The COVID-19 pandemic was impacting the health and economy around the world. All countries have taken measures to control the spread of the epidemic. Because it is not known when the epidemic will end in several countries, then the prediction of the COVID-19 pandemic is a very important challenge. This study has predicted the temporal evolution of the COVID-19 pandemic in several countries using the logistic growth model. This model has analyzed several countries to describe the epidemic situation of these countries. The time interval of the actual data used as a comparison with the prediction results of this model was starting in the firstly confirmed COVID-19 cases to December 2020. This study examined an approach to the complexity spread of the COVID-19 pandemic using the logistic growth model formed from an ordinary differential equation. This model described the time-dependent population growth rate characterized by the three parameters of the analytical solution. The non-linear least-squares method was used to estimate the three parameters. These parameters described the rate growth constant of infected cases and the total number of confirmed cases in the final phase of the epidemic. This model is applied to the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic in several countries. The prediction results show the spread dynamics of COVID-19 infected cases which are characterized by time-dependent dynamics. In this study, the proposed model provides estimates for the model parameters that are good for predicting the COVID-19 pandemic because they correspond to actual data for all analyzed countries. It is based on the coefficient of determination, R2, and the R2 value of more than 95% which is obtained from the non-linear curves for all analyzed countries. It shows that this model has the potential to contribute to better public health policy-making in the prevention of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Keywords: COVID-19; epidemic; least-squares; logistic model; prediction.