Application of SEIR Model in COVID-19 and The Effect of Lockdown on Reducing The Number of Active Cases

he spread of COVID-19 within a region in South East Asia has been modelled using a compartment model called SEIR (Susceptible, Exposed, Infected, Recovered). Actual number of sick people needing treatments, or the number active case data was used to obtain realistic values of the model parameters such as the reproduction number (R0), incubation, and recovery periods. It is shown that at the beginning of the pandemic where most people were still not aware, the R0 was very high as seen by the steep increase of people got infected and admitted to the hospitals. Few weeks after the lockdown of the region was in place and people were obeying the regulation and observing safe distancing, the R0 values dropped significantly and converged to a steady value of about 3. Using the obtained model parameters, fitted on a daily basis, the maximum number of active cases converged to a certain value of about 2500 cases. It is expected that in the early June 2020 that the number of active cases will drop to a significantly low level.