Application of distribution-delay models to estimating the hospitalized mortality rate of covid-19 according to delay effect of hospitalizations counts

Introduction:The COVID-19 infectious epidemic has become a serious worry all over the world, including Iran. The high outbreak of disease ranked Iran as second in Asia and 11th in the world. Given the growing progress of this epidemic in infecting and killing individuals, it is essential to forecast the delay effect of the number of hospitalized upon the hospitalized mortality rate. Methods: In this study, we used the daily Hospitalization cases of COVID-19 of IRAN for the period of 15-May 2020 to 5-Oct 2020 which were obtained from the online database. Five distribution delay models were compared for estimating and forecasting. Results: Based on measurement errors DDM selected as the best model for forecasting the number of death. According to this model, the long-run effects show that observing the effect of hospitalization counts on death counts takes an average of five days and the long-run hospitalized mortality rate was 12%. Conclusion: The overall hospitalized mortality rate of COVID-19 in Iran is less than the global rate of 15%. The mean of delay effect of daily hospitalization on mortality is approximately 5 days. Our findings showed distributed delay model (DDM) has better performance in the forecasting of the future behavior of the Coronavirus mortality, and providing to government and health care decision- makers the possibility to predict the outcomes of their decision on public health