Best-fit epidemiological models for COVID-19: New cases in Korea

The outbreak of COVID-19 has turned the year 2020 upside-down. While scientists have made progress in our understanding of the structure, transmission, and treatment of the disease, there remains a question as to the long-term immunity of recovered patients. Our research attempts to answer this question by fitting model parameters of three epidemiological models (SIR, SEIR, and SIRS) to COVID-19 data from the Republic of Korea. We find that the SIRS model is the best-fit model, which suggests that - at least for the Republic of Korea during our study period - people obtain limited immunity post-infection.