Analysis and Estimation of COVID-19 Spreading in Russia Based on ARIMA Model

Russia has been currently in the “hard-hit” area of the COVID-19 outbreak, with more than 396,000 confirmed cases as of May 30. It is necessary to analyze and predict its epidemic situation to help formulate effective public health policies. Autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) models were developed to predict the cumulative confirmed, dead, and recovered cases, respectively. R 3.6.2 software was used to fit the data from January 31 to May 20, 2020, and predict the data for the next 30 days. The COVID-19 epidemic in Russia was divided into two stages and reached its peak in May. The epidemic began to stabilize on May 19. The case fatality rate has been at an extremely low level. ARIMA (2,2,1), ARIMA (3,2,0), and ARIMA (0,2,1) were the models of cumulative confirmed, dead, and recovered cases, respectively. After testing, the mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) of three models were 0.6, 3.9, and 2.4, respectively. This paper indicates that Russia’s health system capacity can effectively respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. Three ARIMA models have a good fitting effect and can be used for short-term prediction of the COVID-19 trend, providing a theoretical basis for Russia to formulate new intervention policies.