# Forecasting the Spread of COVID-19 in Kuwait Using Compartmental and Logistic Regression Models
## 1 Introduction  
Since the detection of the first case of the novel coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) in December 2019 in Wuhan City, Hubei Province, China, the number of identified cases has been increasing rapidly. Significant spread prevention measures were implemented by the Chinese government such as locking down the city of Wuhan and closing routes to all cities in Hubei Province in late January 2020. Despite these measures, the COVID-19 disease spread globally and was declared as an epidemic by the World Health Organization (WHO) [1]. The drastic increase in the number of cases for COVID-19 became an emergency and a profound health issue worldwide. Today, the spread of COVID-19 is a growing public health concern worldwide, which imposes a significant challenge politically, economically and socially. Efforts are being exerted globally to limit and slow down the spread of the virus. The COVID-19 characteristics of strong infectivity, long incubation period, difficulties of detection, and uncertainty in ways of transmission increase the vagueness and the complications of controlling the outbreak. Therefore, solidarity in the fight against COVID-19 is recognized and considered an imperative necessity during this time. Studies on modeling and forecasting of the epidemic were carried out by various researchers [2] to tackle this spread and provide analytical predictions on the size and end phase of the spread. [PERSON] [3] applied the Susceptible-Exposed-Infected-Recovered (SEIR) compartmental model for the prediction of the epidemic peak in order to provide an insight of the feasibility of conducting the Summer Olympics of 2020 in Japan. [PERSON] et al. [4] forecast the number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 for ten days in China using a modified version for the flower pollination algorithm (FPA) coupled with the salp swarm algorithm (SSA). [PERSON] et al. [5] forecast the increase of COVID-19 cases outside of China by a specific date to reach 1 million cases based on heuristic and WHO situation reports. [PERSON], et al, [6] estimated the size of the epidemic in Wuhan and forecast the extent of domestic and global public health risks of the epidemic taking into account the social and nonpharmaceutical spread interventions. To date, researchers from science, engineering and social sciences disciplines are contributing rapidly with studies that provide governments and health institutions with analyses that are helpful in decision making and predicting the unforeseen challenges on local and global scales. Various prevention measures were implemented by various countries as a reaction to the different patterns of the outbreak. Reporting these measures and their impact on the spread should be carried out to the benefit of implementing an appropriate containment plan. Globally, the outbreak nature of the COVID-19 disease is negatively impacting the economy, education, industry, trade supply chains and social aspects of life. The state of Kuwait, with a total population of 4.270 million [7], was faced by the new epidemic of COVID-19 and reported the first five cases on 24 February 2020. The cases were imported from travelers and were not caused by local transmission. Table 1 shows the number of newly reported COVID-19 cases in Kuwait from 24 February until 19 April 2020. As a result, Kuwait undertook rigorous containment and quarantine efforts to reduce the results of the outbreak, to keep the health system efficient and robust and to slow down the time to reach the peak of the epidemic. The containment measures, presented in Table 2, were extracted from the official releases of the government of Kuwait [8]. The intervention measures aim to reduce the contact rate between individuals and hence reducing the rate of the outbreak. These measures include slowing the epidemic spread rate among elderly persons and people with chronic disease; mitigating the transmission rate among the clinical and nursing staff; reducing the overall death rate, and protecting the overall health system.