Epidemic Analysis of COVID-19 in Egypt, Qatar and Saudi Arabia using the Generalized SEIR Model

BackgroundSince its emergence in late December 2019 and its declaration as a global pandemic by World Health Organization (WHO) on March 11, 2020, the novel coronavirus disease known as (COVID-19) has attracted global attention. The process of modeling and predicting the pandemic behavior became crucial as the different states needed accurate predictions to be able to adopt suitable policies to minimize the pressure on their health care systems. Researchers have employed modified variants of classical SIR/SEIR models to describe the dynamics of this pandemic. In this paper, after proven effective in numerous countries, a modified variant of SEIR is implemented to predict the behavior of COVID-19 in Egypt and other countries in the Middle East and North Africa region (MENA). MethodsWe built MATLAB simulations to fit the real data of COVID-19 Active, recovered and death Cases in Egypt, Qatar and Saudi Arabia to the modified SEIR model via Nelder-Mead algorithm to be able to estimate the future dynamics of the pandemic. FindingsWe estimate several characteristics of COVID-19 future dynamics in Egypt, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. We also estimate that the pandemic will resolve in the countries under investigation in February 2021, January 2021 and 28th August 2020 With total death cases of 9,742, 5,600, 185 and total cases of 187,600, 490,000, 120,000, respectively.