Modeling and forecasting the spread of COVID-19 pandemic: The case of Vietnam

Abstract

Examining the evolution of the COVID-19 pandemic in many countries since the beginning of the pandemic outbreak in early 2020, we found a common pattern of daily infections with a skewed distribution with different peaks. This trend was observed in Vietnam. Based on those observations, we adapted the skewed distribution function Logistic Growth (Skewed Logistic Growth – SLG) to develop our model for forecasting COVID-19 infections. In the case of Vietnam, we focused on the fourth outbreak – the largest and most complicated pandemic in the country to date. The results depict a clear pattern following closely with the actual development of three infection waves during the fourth outbreak. This confirms that the model can be used to forecast the spread of COVID-19 in the coming time, as the pandemic situation will be more complicated due to the appearance of new variants (i.e., Delta, Omicron, etc.) along with critical adjustments in the government pandemic control and prevention strategies. The model forecasted that the fourth outbreak would peak between the end of December 2021 and the end of January 2022, with about 16,000 new cases per day. The forecasting results are useful for the government and relevant agencies to proactively design timely and effective solutions for prevention. It further proposes various directions for future research to enrich the methodological aspects and empirical evidence of the research domain.