Pandemic Analysis and Prediction of COVID-19 Using Gaussian Doubling Times

COVID-19 has become a pandemic, with cases all over the world, with widespread disruption in some countries, such as Italy, US, India, South Korea, and Japan. Early and reliable detection of COVID-19 is mandatory to control the spread of infection. Moreover, prediction of COVID-19 spread in near future is also crucial to better plan for the disease control. For this purpose, we proposed a robust framework for the analysis, prediction, and detection of COVID-19. We make reliable estimates on key pandemic parameters and make predictions on the point of inflection and possible washout time for various countries around the world. The estimates, analysis and predictions are based on the data gathered from Johns Hopkins Center during the time span of April 21 to June 27, 2020. We use the normal distribution for simple and quick predictions of the coronavirus pandemic model and estimate the parameters of Gaussian curves using the least square parameter curve fitting for several countries in different continents. The predictions rely on the possible outcomes of Gaussian time evolution with the central limit theorem of statistics the predictions to be well justified. The parameters of Gaussian distribution, i.e., maximum time and width, are determined through a statistical χ2-fit for the purpose of doubling times after April 21, 2020. For COVID-19 detection, we proposed a novel method based on the Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG) and CNN in multi-class classification scenario i.e., Normal, COVID-19, viral pneumonia etc. Experimental results show the effectiveness of our framework for reliable prediction and detection of COVID-19.     

Machine Learning Approach for COVID-19 Detection on Twitter

Social networking services (SNSs) provide massive data that can be a very influential source of information during pandemic outbreaks. This study shows that social media analysis can be used as a crisis detector (e.g., understanding the sentiment of social media users regarding various pandemic outbreaks). The novel Coronavirus Disease-19 (COVID-19), commonly known as coronavirus, has affected everyone worldwide in 2020. Streaming Twitter data have revealed the status of the COVID-19 outbreak in the most affected regions. This study focuses on identifying COVID-19 patients using tweets without requiring medical records to find the COVID-19 pandemic in Twitter messages (tweets). For this purpose, we propose herein an intelligent model using traditional machine learning-based approaches, such as support vector machine (SVM), logistic regression (LR), naïve Bayes (NB), random forest (RF), and decision tree (DT) with the help of the term frequency inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) to detect the COVID-19 pandemic in Twitter messages. The proposed intelligent traditional machine learning-based model classifies Twitter messages into four categories, namely, confirmed deaths, recovered, and suspected. For the experimental analysis, the tweet data on the COVID-19 pandemic are analyzed to evaluate the results of traditional machine learning approaches. A benchmark dataset for COVID-19 on Twitter messages is developed and can be used for future research studies. The experiments show that the results of the proposed approach are promising in detecting the COVID-19 pandemic in Twitter messages with overall accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score between 70% and 80% and the confusion matrix for machine learning approaches (i.e., SVM, NB, LR, RF, and DT) with the TF-IDF feature extraction technique.     

Prediction of COVID-19 Confirmed Cases Using Gradient Boosting Regression Method

The fast spread of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) caused by SARSCoV-2 has become a pandemic and a serious threat to the world. As of May 30, 2020, this disease had infected more than 6 million people globally, with hundreds of thousands of deaths. Therefore, there is an urgent need to predict confirmed cases so as to analyze the impact of COVID-19 and practice readiness in healthcare systems. This study uses gradient boosting regression (GBR) to build a trained model to predict the daily total confirmed cases of COVID-19. The GBR method can minimize the loss function of the training process and create a single strong learner from weak learners. Experiments are conducted on a dataset of daily confirmed COVID-19 cases from January 22, 2020, to May 30, 2020. The results are evaluated on a set of evaluation performance measures using 10-fold cross-validation to demonstrate the effectiveness of the GBR method. The results reveal that the GBR model achieves 0.00686 root mean square error, the lowest among several comparative models.     

COVID-19 pandemic dynamics in India,the SARS-CoV-2 Delta variant and implications for vaccination

The Delta variant is a major SARS-CoV-2 variant of concern first identified in India. To better understand COVID-19 pandemic dynamics and Delta, we use multiple datasets and model-inference to reconstruct COVID-19 pandemic dynamics in India during March 2020–June 2021. We further use the large discrepancy in one- and two-dose vaccination coverage in India (53% versus 23% by end of October 2021) to examine the impact of vaccination and whether prior non-Delta infection can boost vaccine effectiveness (VE). We estimate that Delta escaped immunity in 34.6% (95% CI: 0–64.2%) of individuals with prior wild-type infection and was 57.0% (95% CI: 37.9–75.6%) more infectious than wild-type SARS-CoV-2. Models assuming higher VE among non-Delta infection recoverees, particularly after the first dose, generated more accurate predictions than those assuming no such increases (best-performing VE setting: 90/95% versus 30/67% baseline for the first/second dose). Counterfactual modelling indicates that high vaccination coverage for first vaccine dose in India combined with the boosting of VE among recoverees averted around 60% of infections during July–mid-October 2021. These findings provide support to prioritizing first-dose vaccination in regions with high underlying infection rates, given continued vaccine shortages and new variant emergence.     

Prediction of COVID-19 Cases Using Machine Learning for Effective Public Health Management

COVID-19 is a pandemic that has affected nearly every country in the world. At present, sustainable development in the area of public health is considered vital to securing a promising and prosperous future for humans. However, widespread diseases, such as COVID-19, create numerous challenges to this goal, and some of those challenges are not yet defined. In this study, a Shallow Single-Layer Perceptron Neural Network (SSLPNN) and Gaussian Process Regression (GPR) model were used for the classification and prediction of confirmed COVID-19 cases in five geographically distributed regions of Asia with diverse settings and environmental conditions: namely, China, South Korea, Japan, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan. Significant environmental and non-environmental features were taken as the input dataset, and confirmed COVID-19 cases were taken as the output dataset. A correlation analysis was done to identify patterns in the cases related to fluctuations in the associated variables. The results of this study established that the population and air quality index of a region had a statistically significant influence on the cases. However, age and the human development index had a negative influence on the cases. The proposed SSLPNN-based classification model performed well when predicting the classes of confirmed cases. During training, the binary classification model was highly accurate, with a Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) of 0.91. Likewise, the results of the regression analysis using the GPR technique with Matern 5/2 were highly accurate (RMSE = 0.95239) when predicting the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in an area. However, dynamic management has occupied a core place in studies on the sustainable development of public health but dynamic management depends on proactive strategies based on statistically verified approaches, like Artificial Intelligence (AI). In this study, an SSLPNN model has been trained to fit public health associated data into an appropriate class, allowing GPR to predict the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in an area based on the given values of selected parameters. Therefore, this tool can help authorities in different ecological settings effectively manage COVID-19.     

A Scenario-Based Evaluation of COVID-19-Related Essential Clinical Resource Demands in China

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic is a global crisis, and medical systems in many countries are overwhelmed with supply shortages and increasing demands to treat patients due to the surge in cases and severe illnesses. This study aimed to assess COVID-19-related essential clinical resource demands in China, based on different scenarios involving COVID-19 spreads and interventions. We used a susceptible–exposed–infectious–hospitalized/isolated–removed (SEIHR) transmission dynamics model to estimate the number of COVID-19 infections and hospitalizations with corresponding essential healthcare resources needed. We found that, under strict non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) or mass vaccination of the population, China would be able to contain community transmission and local outbreaks rapidly. However, under scenarios involving a low intensity of implemented NPIs and a small proportion of the population vaccinated, the use of a peacetime–wartime transition model would be needed for medical source stockpiles and preparations to ensure a normal functioning healthcare system. The implementation of COVID-19 vaccines and NPIs in different periods can influence the transmission of COVID-19 and subsequently affect the demand for clinical diagnosis and treatment. An increased proportion of asymptomatic infections in simulations will not reduce the demand for medical resources; however, attention must be paid to the increasing difficulty in containing COVID-19 transmission due to asymptomatic cases. This study provides evidence for emergency preparations and the adjustment of prevention and control strategies during the COVID-19 pandemic. It also provides guidance for essential healthcare investment and resource allocation.     

Machine Learning and Classical Forecasting Methods Based Decision Support Systems for COVID-19

From late 2019 to the present day, the coronavirus outbreak tragically affected the whole world and killed tens of thousands of people. Many countries have taken very stringent measures to alleviate the effects of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) and are still being implemented. In this study, various machine learning techniques are implemented to predict possible confirmed cases and mortality numbers for the future. According to these models, we have tried to shed light on the future in terms of possible measures to be taken or updating the current measures. Support Vector Machines (SVM), Holt-Winters, Prophet, and Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM) forecasting models are applied to the novel COVID-19 dataset. According to the results, the Prophet model gives the lowest Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) score compared to the other three models. Besides, according to this model, a projection for the future COVID-19 predictions of Turkey has been drawn and aimed to shape the current measures against the coronavirus.     

The spatial dissemination of COVID-19 and associated socio-economic consequences

The ongoing coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has wreaked havoc worldwide with millions of lives claimed, human travel restricted and economic development halted. Leveraging city-level mobility and case data, our analysis shows that the spatial dissemination of COVID-19 can be well explained by a local diffusion process in the mobility network rather than a global diffusion process, indicating the effectiveness of the implemented disease prevention and control measures. Based on the constructed case prediction model, it is estimated that there could be distinct social consequences if the COVID-19 outbreak happened in different areas. During the epidemic control period, human mobility experienced substantial reductions and the mobility network underwent remarkable local and global structural changes toward containing the spread of COVID-19. Our work has important implications for the mitigation of disease and the evaluation of the socio-economic consequences of COVID-19 on society.     

A semi-parametric,state-space compartmental model with time-dependent parameters for forecasting COVID-19 cases,hospitalizations and deaths

Short-term forecasts of the dynamics of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in the period up to its decline following mass vaccination was a task that received much attention but proved difficult to do with high accuracy. However, the availability of standardized forecasts and versioned datasets from this period allows for continued work in this area. Here, we introduce the Gaussian infection state space with time dependence (GISST) forecasting model. We evaluate its performance in one to four weeks ahead forecasts of COVID-19 cases, hospital admissions and deaths in the state of California made with official reports of COVID-19, Google’s mobility reports and vaccination data available each week. Evaluation of these forecasts with a weighted interval score shows them to consistently outperform a naive baseline forecast and often score closer to or better than a high-performing ensemble forecaster. The GISST model also provides parameter estimates for a compartmental model of COVID-19 dynamics, includes a regression submodel for the transmission rate and allows for parameters to vary over time according to a random walk. GISST provides a novel, balanced combination of computational efficiency, model interpretability and applicability to large multivariate datasets that may prove useful in improving the accuracy of infectious disease forecasts.     

Sine Cosine Optimization with Deep Learning-Based Applied Linguistics for Sentiment Analysis on COVID-19 Tweets

Applied linguistics is an interdisciplinary domain which identifies, investigates, and offers solutions to language-related real-life problems. The new coronavirus disease, otherwise known as Coronavirus disease (COVID-19), has severely affected the everyday life of people all over the world. Specifically, since there is insufficient access to vaccines and no straight or reliable treatment for coronavirus infection, the country has initiated the appropriate preventive measures (like lockdown, physical separation, and masking) for combating this extremely transmittable disease. So, individuals spent more time on online social media platforms (i.e., Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Reddit) and expressed their thoughts and feelings about coronavirus infection. Twitter has become one of the popular social media platforms and allows anyone to post tweets. This study proposes a sine cosine optimization with bidirectional gated recurrent unit-based sentiment analysis (SCOBGRU-SA) on COVID-19 tweets. The SCOBGRU-SA technique aimed to detect and classify the various sentiments in Twitter data during the COVID-19 pandemic. The SCOBGRU-SA technique follows data pre-processing and the Fast-Text word embedding process to accomplish this. Moreover, the BGRU model is utilized to recognise and classify sentiments present in the tweets. Furthermore, the SCO algorithm is exploited for tuning the BGRU method’s hyperparameter, which helps attain improved classification performance. The experimental validation of the SCOBGRU-SA technique takes place using a benchmark dataset, and the results signify its promising performance compared to other DL models.     

Geospatial Analytics for COVID-19 Active Case Detection

Ever since the COVID-19 pandemic started in Wuhan, China, much research work has been focusing on the clinical aspect of SARS-CoV-2. Researchers have been leveraging on various Artificial Intelligence techniques as an alternative to medical approach in understanding the virus. Limited studies have, however, reported on COVID-19 transmission pattern analysis, and using geography features for prediction of potential outbreak sites. Predicting the next most probable outbreak site is crucial, particularly for optimizing the planning of medical personnel and supply resources. To tackle the challenge, this work proposed distance-based similarity measures to predict the next most probable outbreak site together with its magnitude, when would the outbreak likely to happen and the duration of the outbreak. The work began with preprocessing of 1365 patient records from six districts in the most populated state named Selangor in Malaysia. The dataset was then aggregated with population density information and human elicited geography features that might promote the transmission of COVID-19. Empirical findings indicated that the proposed unified decision-making approach outperformed individual distance metric in predicting the total cases, next outbreak location, and the time interval between start dates of two similar sites. Such findings provided valuable insights for policymakers to perform Active Case Detection.     

Deep Learning and Holt-Trend Algorithms for Predicting Covid-19 Pandemic

The Covid-19 epidemic poses a serious public health threat to the world, where people with little or no pre-existing human immunity can be more vulnerable to its effects. Thus, developing surveillance systems for predicting the Covid-19 pandemic at an early stage could save millions of lives. In this study, a deep learning algorithm and a Holt-trend model are proposed to predict the coronavirus. The Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM) and Holt-trend algorithms were applied to predict confirmed numbers and death cases. The real time data used has been collected from the World Health Organization (WHO). In the proposed research, we have considered three countries to test the proposed model, namely Saudi Arabia, Spain and Italy. The results suggest that the LSTM models show better performance in predicting the cases of coronavirus patients. Standard measure performance Mean squared Error (MSE), Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE), Mean error and correlation are employed to estimate the results of the proposed models. The empirical results of the LSTM, using the correlation metrics, are 99.94%, 99.94% and 99.91% in predicting the number of confirmed cases in the three countries. As far as the results of the LSTM model in predicting the number of death of Covid-19, they are 99.86%, 98.876% and 99.16% with respect to Saudi Arabia, Italy and Spain respectively. Similarly, the experiment’s results of the Holt-Trend model in predicting the number of confirmed cases of Covid-19, using the correlation metrics, are 99.06%, 99.96% and 99.94%, whereas the results of the Holt-Trend model in predicting the number of death cases are 99.80%, 99.96% and 99.94% with respect to the Saudi Arabia, Italy and Spain respectively. The empirical results indicate the efficient performance of the presented model in predicting the number of confirmed and death cases of Covid-19 in these countries. Such findings provide better insights regarding the future of Covid-19 this pandemic in general. The results were obtained by applying time series models, which need to be considered for the sake of saving the lives of many people.     

Efficient Deep CNN Model for COVID-19 Classification

Coronavirus (COVID-19) infection was initially acknowledged as a global pandemic in Wuhan in China. World Health Organization (WHO) stated that the COVID-19 is an epidemic that causes a 3.4% death rate. Chest X-Ray (CXR) and Computerized Tomography (CT) screening of infected persons are essential in diagnosis applications. There are numerous ways to identify positive COVID-19 cases. One of the fundamental ways is radiology imaging through CXR, or CT images. The comparison of CT and CXR scans revealed that CT scans are more effective in the diagnosis process due to their high quality. Hence, automated classification techniques are required to facilitate the diagnosis process. Deep Learning (DL) is an effective tool that can be utilized for detection and classification this type of medical images. The deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) can learn and extract essential features from different medical image datasets. In this paper, a CNN architecture for automated COVID-19 detection from CXR and CT images is offered. Three activation functions as well as three optimizers are tested and compared for this task. The proposed architecture is built from scratch and the COVID-19 image datasets are directly fed to train it. The performance is tested and investigated on the CT and CXR datasets. Three activation functions: Tanh, Sigmoid, and ReLU are compared using a constant learning rate and different batch sizes. Different optimizers are studied with different batch sizes and a constant learning rate. Finally, a comparison between different combinations of activation functions and optimizers is presented, and the optimal configuration is determined. Hence, the main objective is to improve the detection accuracy of COVID-19 from CXR and CT images using DL by employing CNNs to classify medical COVID-19 images in an early stage. The proposed model achieves a classification accuracy of 91.67% on CXR image dataset, and a classification accuracy of 100% on CT dataset with training times of 58 min and 46 min on CXR and CT datasets, respectively. The best results are obtained using the ReLU activation function combined with the SGDM optimizer at a learning rate of 10⁻⁵ and a minibatch size of 16.     

Intelligent Cloud IoMT Health Monitoring-Based System for COVID-19

The most common alarming and dangerous disease in the world today is the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). The coronavirus is perceived as a group of coronaviruses which causes mild to severe respiratory diseases among human beings. The infection is spread by aerosols emitted from infected individuals during talking, sneezing, and coughing. Furthermore, infection can occur by touching a contaminated surface followed by transfer of the viral load to the face. Transmission may occur through aerosols that stay suspended in the air for extended periods of time in enclosed spaces. To stop the spread of the pandemic, it is crucial to isolate infected patients in quarantine houses. Government health organizations faced a lack of quarantine houses and medical test facilities at the first level of testing by the proposed model. If any serious condition is observed at the first level testing, then patients should be recommended to be hospitalized. In this study, an IoT-enabled smart monitoring system is proposed to detect COVID-19 positive patients and monitor them during their home quarantine. The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT), known as healthcare IoT, is employed as the foundation of the proposed model. The least-squares (LS) method was applied to estimate the linear model parameters for a sequential pilot survey. A statistical sequential analysis is performed as a pilot survey to efficiently collect preliminary data for an extensive survey of COVID-19 positive cases. The Bayesian approach is used, based on the assumption of the random variable for the priori distribution of the data sample. Fuzzy inference is used to construct different rules based on the basic symptoms of COVID-19 patients to make an expert decision to detect COVID-19 positive cases. Finally, the performance of the proposed model was determined by applying a four-fold cross-validation technique.     

What is Discussed about COVID-19: A Multi-Modal Framework for Analyzing Microblogs from Sina Weibo without Human Labeling

Starting from late 2019, the new coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has become a global crisis. With the development of online social media, people prefer to express their opinions and discuss the latest news online. We have witnessed the positive influence of online social media, which helped citizens and governments track the development of this pandemic in time. It is necessary to apply artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to online social media and automatically discover and track public opinions posted online. In this paper, we take Sina Weibo, the most widely used online social media in China, for analysis and experiments. We collect multi-modal microblogs about COVID-19 from 2020/1/1 to 2020/3/31 with a web crawler, including texts and images posted by users. In order to effectively discover what is being discussed about COVID-19 without human labeling, we propose a unified multi-modal framework, including an unsupervised short-text topic model to discover and track bursty topics, and a selfsupervised model to learn image features so that we can retrieve related images about COVID-19. Experimental results have shown the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed models, and also have shown the considerable application prospects for analyzing and tracking public opinions about COVID-19.     

Attention-Based and Time Series Models for Short-Term Forecasting of COVID-19 Spread

The growing number of COVID-19 cases puts pressure on healthcare services and public institutions worldwide. The pandemic has brought much uncertainty to the global economy and the situation in general. Forecasting methods and modeling techniques are important tools for governments to manage critical situations caused by pandemics, which have negative impact on public health. The main purpose of this study is to obtain short-term forecasts of disease epidemiology that could be useful for policymakers and public institutions to make necessary short-term decisions. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed attention-based method combining certain data mining algorithms and the classical ARIMA model for short-term forecasts, data on the spread of the COVID-19 virus in Lithuania is used, the forecasts of epidemic dynamics were examined, and the results were presented in the study. Nevertheless, the approach presented might be applied to any country and other pandemic situations. The COVID-19 outbreak started at different times in different countries, hence some countries have a longer history of the disease with more historical data than others. The paper proposes a novel approach to data registration and machine learning-based analysis using data from attention-based countries for forecast validation to predict trends of the spread of COVID-19 and assess risks.     

Automatic Detection of COVID-19 Using a Stacked Denoising Convolutional Autoencoder

The exponential increase in new coronavirus disease 2019 ({COVID-19}) cases and deaths has made COVID-19 the leading cause of death in many countries. Thus, in this study, we propose an efficient technique for the automatic detection of COVID-19 and pneumonia based on X-ray images. A stacked denoising convolutional autoencoder (SDCA) model was proposed to classify X-ray images into three classes: normal, pneumonia, and {COVID-19}. The SDCA model was used to obtain a good representation of the input data and extract the relevant features from noisy images. The proposed model’s architecture mainly composed of eight autoencoders, which were fed to two dense layers and SoftMax classifiers. The proposed model was evaluated with 6356 images from the datasets from different sources. The experiments and evaluation of the proposed model were applied to an 80/20 training/validation split and for five cross-validation data splitting, respectively. The metrics used for the SDCA model were the classification accuracy, precision, sensitivity, and specificity for both schemes. Our results demonstrated the superiority of the proposed model in classifying X-ray images with high accuracy of 96.8%. Therefore, this model can help physicians accelerate COVID-19 diagnosis.     

An Application Review of Artificial Intelligence in Prevention and Cure of COVID-19 Pandemic

Coronaviruses are a well-known family of viruses that can infect humans or animals. Recently, the new coronavirus (COVID-19) has spread worldwide. All countries in the world are working hard to control the coronavirus disease. However, many countries are faced with a lack of medical equipment and an insufficient number of medical personnel because of the limitations of the medical system, which leads to the mass spread of diseases. As a powerful tool, artificial intelligence (AI) has been successfully applied to solve various complex problems ranging from big data analysis to computer vision. In the process of epidemic control, many algorithms are proposed to solve problems in various fields of medical treatment, which is able to reduce the workload of the medical system. Due to excellent learning ability, AI has played an important role in drug development, epidemic forecast, and clinical diagnosis. This research provides a comprehensive overview of relevant research on AI during the outbreak and helps to develop new and more powerful methods to deal with the current pandemic.