Forecasting COVID-19 Dynamics and Endpoint in Bangladesh: A Data-driven Approach

On December 31, 2019, the World Health Organization (WHO) was informed that atypical pneumonia-like cases have emerged in Wuhan City, Hubei province, China. WHO identified it as a novel coronavirus and declared a global pandemic on March 11th, 2020. At the time of writing this, the COVID-19 claimed more than 440 thousand lives worldwide and led to the global economy and social life into an abyss edge in the living memory. As of now, the confirmed cases in Bangladesh have surpassed 100 thousand and more than 1343 deaths putting startling concern on the policymakers and health professionals; thus, prediction models are necessary to forecast a possible number of cases in the future. To shed light on it, in this paper, we presented data-driven estimation methods, the Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks, and Logistic Curve methods to predict the possible number of COVID-19 cases in Bangladesh for the upcoming months. The results using Logistic Curve suggests that Bangladesh has passed the inflection point on around 28-30 May 2020, a plausible end date to be on the 2nd of January 2021 and it is expected that the total number of infected people to be between 187 thousand to 193 thousand with the assumption that stringent policies are in place. The logistic curve also suggested that Bangladesh would reach peak COVID-19 cases at the end of August with more than 185 thousand total confirmed cases, and around 6000 thousand daily new cases may observe. Our findings recommend that the containment strategies should immediately implement to reduce transmission and epidemic rate of COVID-19 in upcoming days. HighlightsO_LIAccording to the Logistic curve fitting analysis, the inflection point of the COVID-19 pandemic has recently passed, which was approximately between May 28, 2020, to May 30, 2020. C_LIO_LIIt is estimated that the total number of confirmed cases will be around 187-193 thousand at the end of the epidemic. We expect that the actual number will most likely to in between these two values, under the assumption that the current transmission is stable and improved stringent policies will be in place to contain the spread of COVID-19. C_LIO_LIThe estimated total death toll will be around 3600-4000 at the end of the epidemic. C_LIO_LIThe epidemic of COVID-19 in Bangladesh will be mostly under control by the 2nd of January 2021 if stringent measures are taken immediately. C_LI