  Coronavirus disease (COVID-2019) is a severe ongoing novel pandemic that is
spreading quickly across the world. Italy, that is widely considered one of the
main epicenters of the pandemic, has registered the highest COVID-2019 death
rates and death toll in the world, to the present day. In this article I
estimate an autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) model to forecast
the epidemic trend over the period after April 4, 2020, by using the Italian
epidemiological data at national and regional level. The data refer to the
number of daily confirmed cases officially registered by the Italian Ministry
of Health (www.salute.gov.it) for the period February 20 to April 4, 2020. The
main advantage of this model is that it is easy to manage and fit. Moreover, it
may give a first understanding of the basic trends, by suggesting the
hypothetic epidemic's inflection point and final size.
