On December 8, 2019, the Chinese government reported the death of one patient and the hospitalization of 41 others with unknown etiology in Wuhan [1]. This cluster initiated the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) epidemic respiratory disease. While early cases of the disease were linked to the wet market, human-to-human transmission has led to widespread outbreak of the virus through China [2]. On January 30, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced the emergence of COVID-19 as a public health emergency with international concern (PHEIC) [3].
On the basis of the global spread and severity of the disease, on March 11, the Director-General of WHO officially declared the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic [4]. The pandemic of COVID-19 has entered a new stage with rapid spread in countries outside China [5]. According to the 56th WHO situation report [6], as of March 16, the number of COVID-19 confirmed cases outside of China has exceeded of China, so after March 17, instead of providing patient statistics in and outside of China, WHO report the number of confirmed and dead cases on each continent.
According to the 70th WHO situation reports [7], by March 30, the number of people infected with COVID-2019 worldwide is 693282, of which 392815 (about 57%) are in European Region, 142081 (about 20%) in Region of the Americas, 103775 (about 15%) in Western Pacific Region, 46329 (about 7%) in Eastern Mediterranean Region, 4084 (about 0.5%) in South-East Asia Region, and 3486 (about 0.5%) in African Region. Of these, 33106 globally died, of which 23962 (about 72% of all death) are in European Region, 3649 are in western pacific Region (about 11% of all death) and 5488 (about 17%) are collectively in other regions.
Due to the widespread and growing prevalence of COVID-2019 across the world, several works have examined different aspects of the disease. These include identifying the source of the virus and analyzing its gene sequences [8, 9], analysis of patient information [10], analyzing the first cases in the countries involved [11–13], methods of virus detection [14, 15], analyzing the epidemiological outbreak [16, 17], and predicting COVID-19 cases [2, 17–20].
In [18], the exponential curve is proposed for forecasting the growth of new cases for two-week ahead, by March 30, based on the WHO situation reports and the heuristic method. The model has been tested for the 58th situation report based on previous reports. They reported 1.29% error. Then based on this assumption that the current trend can continue for the next 17 days, they predicted one million new cases outside of China by March 30.
In [17], the CoronaTracker team proposed a Susceptible-Exposed-Infectious-Recovered (SEIR) model based on the queried data in their website, and made the 240-day prediction of COVID-19 cases in and out of China, started on 20 January. They predicted that the outbreak is reached its peak on May 23, and the maximum number of infected individuals will be 425.066 million globally. Then it will start to drop around early July 2020 and reached under 10,000 on 14 Sep 2020.
In [19], the authors examined some available models to predict 5 and 10-day ahead of cumulative cases in Guangdong and Zhejiang by February 23. They used generalized logistic growth, the Richards growth, and a sub-epidemic wave models, which were used to forecast some previous infectious outbreaks.
Although some work has provided methods for predicting COVID-19 cases, on the basis of our knowledge at the time of writing this paper, none have been comprehensive and have not predicted the new cases in each geographical region as well as each continent. In this study, using the coronavirus dataset, we aim to predict COVID-19 infected people in each geographical regions included in the dataset as well as each continent in 2-week ahead. Predicting this situation in the current pandemic is very crucial to containment of the threat because it helps to make timely operations and medical decisions. These include equipping medical facilities, managing the resource allocation, sending more personnel to high-risk areas, deciding whether to close borders or resume traffic, suspend or resume community services.