A Time Series Analysis and Forecast of COVID-19 Healthcare Disparity

This work focuses on a time series analysis and forecast of COVID 19. Decision makers and medical providers will find the work useful in improving cares to the disadvantaged demography, reduce the spread of the coronavirus and improve mitigation strategy to combat the impact of the disease. Our anatomy of COVID cases spans March 2020 to December 2020. COVID 19 forecasting cases and deaths models were built for the total population and blacks in eight states in the USA. State with medium to large populations of blacks were considered for the experiment. We defined COVID-19 Health Care Disparity (CHCD) as the difference between the percentage of Black Cases to Total Cases and Black Deaths to Total Deaths within a period. We hypothesized that a disparity exists if the ratio of black cases to the total COVID-19 population in a state, is less than the ratio of black deaths to the total deaths in the same state. The outcome of our experiment shows that there exists COVID-19 Health Care Disparity in the black community. Furthermore, all things being equal, our forecast suggests that the COVID-19 Health Care Disparities will continue at least till the end of the first quarter of 2021.