Modeling COVID-19 pandemic dynamics in two Asian countries

Abstract

The current epidemic outbreak COVID-19 first took place in the Wuhan city of China and then spread worldwide. This deadly disease affected millions of people and compelled the governments and other concerned institutions to take serious actions. Around 0.28 million people have died from the COVID-19 outbreak as of May 11, 2020, 05:41 GMT, and the number is still increasing exponentially. The results of any scientific investigation of this phenomenon are still to come. However, now it is urgently needed to evaluate and compare the disease dynamics to improve the quarantine activities and the level of individual protection, to at least speed up the rate of isolation of infected persons. In the domain of big data science and other related areas, it is always of interest to provide the best description of the data under consideration. Therefore, in this article, we compare the COVID-19 pandemic dynamics between two neighboring Asian countries, Iran and Pakistan, to provide a framework to arrange the appropriate quarantine activities. Simple tools for comparing this deadly pandemic dynamic have been presented that can be adopted to produce the bases for inferences. Most importantly, a new statistical model is developed to provide the best description of COVID-19 daily deaths data in Iran and Pakistan.