Using Time Series Analysis to Forecast the prevalence of the COVID-19 Pandemic (Iraq and Gulf Cooperation Council countries (GCC))

Abstract

Corona pandemic (COVID - 19) that appeared in China in December 2019 and spread rapidly around the world. Whereas, at the time of writing this paper, its impact was more than (6,800,000) cases, and more than (380,000) deaths and the most affected countries are USA, Brazil, Russia, Spain, and UK. Nevertheless, this paper dealt with the number of cases in Iraq and the six countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council for the period from first of March to 15th of May (Series size 76). The technique of time series analysis was adopted which showed that it is no stationary and was converted to stationary by taking the differences and a model was built for each country and used in the forecasting. Thus, the study result showed that the models that were built are effective by using it to forecast future cases and the possibility of benefiting from the proposed models to forecast the number of cases for each country by updating the data every period of time and rebuilding the models. In addition, the models clarify that the number of cases is increasing for all countries in the coming few