THE FORECAST OF CONFIRMED COVID-19 INFECTION CASES IN UKRAINE

Background. COVID-19 pandemic is one of the world’s newest and most actual problem. The only workable way to stop the spreading of the decease is to introduce quarantine. The stronger quarantine restrictions the stronger they affect the economic and social situation. Objective. Based on the analysis of the literature sources and the own research, we forecast the number of patients with COVID-19 in Ukraine and develop recommendations on the feasibility of introducing the next stages of quarantine limitations. Methods. The following methods were used: the correlation identification between the number of patients with coronavirus in Ukraine and other countries; the development of the trends for long-term and medium-term forecasts of the number of patients with COVID-19 in Ukraine; the use of the non-iterative artificial neural networks (ANN) based on the radial basis functions (RBF) with additional lateral connections between neurons of the latent layer to make a short-term forecast of the number of patients with the decease. Results. The correlation between the number of coronavirus patients in Ukraine, Italy and Spain was revealed. The trend was constructed with the help of polynomials from the 2nd to the 6th degree for long-term forecast of the number of patients with COVID-19 in Ukraine and the long-term forecast was made. The similarities of Ukraine's trajectories with Poland and Sweden were used for the medium-term forecast. It is established that Ukraine is increasingly deviating from the trajectory of Poland and approaching the trajectory of Sweden with a delay of 2-3 days. ANN RBF with additional lateral connections between neurons of the latent layer were used for short-term forecast of the number of patients with COVID-19 in Ukraine. The RMS error of the ANN training for the 14-day forecast is 0.55%, and the maximum is 1.43%. Conclusions. Based on the forecasts, the effect of the first stage of quarantine easing is shown, and the second stage of quarantine restrictions showed the effect on the disease.