Predicting COVID-19 confirmed cases in New York and DKI Jakarta by nonlinear fitting of a Bose–Einstein energy distribution and its implications on social restrictions()

OBJECTIVE: Global society pays huge economic toll and live loss due to COVID-19 (Coronavirus Disease 2019) pandemic. In order to have a better management of this pandemic, many institutions develop their own models to predict number of COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations and mortalities. These models, however, are shown to be unreliable and need to be revised on a daily basis. METHODS: Here, we develop a Bose–Einstein (BE)-based statistical model to predict daily COVID-19 cases up to 14 days in advance. This fat-tailed model is chosen based on three reasons. First, it contains a peak and decaying phase. Second, it also has both accelerated and decelerated phases which are similarly observed in an epidemic curve. Third, the shape of both the BE energy distribution and the epidemic curve is controlled by a set of parameters. The BE model daily predictions are then verified against simulated data and confirmed COVID-19 daily cases from two epidemic centres, i.e. New York and DKI Jakarta. RESULT: Over- predictions occur at the earlier stage of the epidemic for all data sets. Models parameters for both simulated and New York data converge to a certain value only at the latest stage of the epidemic progress. At this stage, model's skill is high for both simulated and New York data, i.e. the predictability is greater than 80% with decreasing RMSE. On the other hand, at that stage, the DKI's model's predictability is still fluctuating with increasing RMSE. CONCLUSION: This implies that New York could leave the stay-at-home order, but DKI Jakarta should continue its large-scale social restriction order. There remains a great challenge in predicting the full course of an epidemic using small data collected during the earlier phase of the epidemic.