A predictive model and country risk assessment for COVID-19: An application of the Limited Failure Population concept

This article provides predictions for the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus for a number of European countries and the United States of America, drawing from their different profiles, both socioeconomically and in terms of outbreak and response to the 2019–2020 coronavirus pandemic, from an engineering and data science perspective. Each country is separately analysed, due to their differences in populations density, cultural habits, health care systems, protective measures, etc. The probabilistic analysis is based on actual data, as provided by the World Health Organization (WHO), as of May 1, 2020. The deployed predictive model provides analytical expressions for the cumulative density function of COVID-19 curve and estimations of the proportion of infected subpopulation for each country. The latter is used to define a Risk Index, towards assessing the level of risk for a country to exhibit high rates of COVID-19 cases after a given interval of observation and given the plans of lifting lockdown measures.