Forecasting the Spread of COVID-19 in Kuwait Using Compartmental and Logistic Regression Models

The state of Kuwait is facing a substantial challenge in responding to the spread of the novel coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) The government�s decision to repatriate stranded citizens back to Kuwait from various COVID-19 epicenters has generated a great concern It has heightened the need for prediction models to estimate the epidemic size Mathematical modeling plays a pivotal role in predicting the spread of infectious diseases to enable policymakers to implement various health and safety measures to contain the spread This research presents a forecast of the COVID-19 epidemic size in Kuwait based on the confirmed data Deterministic and stochastic modeling approaches were used to estimate the size of COVID-19 spread in Kuwait and determine its ending phase In addition, various simulation scenarios were conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of nonpharmaceutical intervention measures, particularly with time-varying infection rates and individual contact numbers Results indicate that, with data until 19 April 2020 and before the repatriation plan, the estimated reproduction number in Kuwait is 2 2 It also confirms the efficiency of the containment measures of the state of Kuwait to control the spread even after the repatriation plan The results show that a high contact rate among the population implies that the epidemic peak value is yet to be reached and that more strict intervention measures must be incorporated