Forecasting Covid-19 New Cases in South Sudan

When it comes to public health these days, COVID-19 is of serious concern and considered as the supreme crisis of the present era. A surge in the number patients testing positive for COVID-19 has created a lot of stress and frustration on governing bodies worldwide and they are finding it difficult to tackle the situation. In this research article, the ANN approach was applied to analyze COVID-19 case volumes in South Sudan. This study is based on daily new cases of COVID-19 in South Sudan 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 South Sudan. It is projected that daily COVID-19 cases in South Sudan are likely to decline to zero cases per day around early April 2021. The government of South Sudan should continue to ensure that there is compliance to control and preventive COVID-19 measures such as social distancing, quarantine, isolation, face-mask wearing and so on. There is also need to embrace the vaccination programme in the country.