Forecasting Covid-19 New Cases in Bhutan

COVID-19 continues to significantly threaten human lives and economies around the globe. In this study, the ANN approach was applied to analyze COVID-19 cases in Bhutan. This study is based on monthly new cases of COVID-19 in Bhutan for the period 1 January 2020 – 25 March 2021. The out-of-sample forecast covers the period 26 March 2021 – 31 July 2021.  The residuals and forecast evaluation criteria (Error, MSE and MAE) of the applied model reveal that the model is stable in forecasting COVID-19 cases in Bhutan. It is projected that daily COVID-19 cases in Bhutan are likely to remain significantly very low over the out-of-sample period. The government should ensure the continued compliance to control and preventive COVID-19 measures such as social distancing, quarantine, isolation, face-mask wearing and so on, as well as vaccinations, in consistency with WHO guidelines on COVID-19 mitigation strategies.