Analysis and Modeling of Dynamic Behavior of the COVID-19 Outbreak: Study Case of Panama

Abstract

Since the start of the outbreak in Wuhan, China, worldwide attention has been given to the progression of this new strain of coronavirus, which has reached the entire World. As Panama is one of the most affected countries in Latin América, and at the same time, it has become one of the countries with stricter control and mitigation measures, we have treated Panama as a modeling lab. In this paper, a mathematical model is proposed in order to analyze the behavior and provide different possible predictions of the virus infection, based in the case of Panama. Public data from the Ministry of Health has been used with a set of differential equations to characterize the outbreak propagation behavior. Key epidemiological parameters were estimated with some degree of confidence to make predictions of the inflection point and possible time of completion of the outbreak in the country. These parameters were obtained using optimization algorithms (non-linear Generalized Reduced Gradient and evolutionary) in order to obtain the minimum possible measures of standard deviation error and mean square error. These parameters were used in the mathematical model described in this paper and in a global comparison simulator, to expand the comprehensive behavior to other possible cases.