A recursive bifurcation model for early forecasting of COVID-19 virus spread in South Korea and Germany

Early forecasting of COVID-19 virus spread is crucial to decision making on lockdown or closure of cities, states or countries. In this paper we design a recursive bifurcation model for analyzing COVID-19 virus spread in different countries. The bifurcation facilitates recursive processing of infected population through linear least-squares fitting. In addition, a nonlinear least-squares fitting procedure is utilized to predict the future values of infected populations. Numerical results on the data from two countries (South Korea and Germany) indicate the effectiveness of our approach, compared to a logistic growth model and a Richards model in the context of early forecast. The limitation of our approach and future research are also mentioned at the end of this paper.