Forecasting the spread of the third wave of COVID-19 pandemic using time series analysis in Bangladesh

During the third wave of the coronavirus epidemic in Bangladesh, the death and infection rate due to this devastating virus has increased dramatically. The rapid spread of the virus is one of the reasons for this terrible condition. So, identifying the subsequent cases of coronavirus can be a great tool to reduce the mortality and infection rate. In this article, we used the autoregressive integrated moving average-ARIMA(8,1,7) model to estimate the expected daily number of COVID-19 cases in Bangladesh based on the data from April 20, 2021, to July 4, 2021. The ARIMA model showed the best results among the five executed models over Autoregressive Model (AR), Moving Average (MA), Autoregressive Moving Average (ARMA), and Rolling Forest Origin. The findings of this article were used to anticipate a rise in daily cases for the next month in Bangladesh, which can help governments plan policies to prevent the spread of the virus. The forecasting outcome indicated that this new trend(named delta variant) in Bangladesh would continue increasing and might reach 18327 daily new cases within four weeks if strict rules and regulations are not applied to control the spread of COVID-19.