COVID-19 is currently threatening countries in the world. Presently in Nigeria, there are about 29,286 confirmed cases, 11,828 discharged and 654 deaths as of 6th July 2020. It is against this background that this study was targeted at modeling daily cases of COVID-19’s deaths in Nigeria using count regression models like; Poisson Regression (PR), Negative Binomial Regression (NBR) and Generalized Poisson Regression (GPR) model. The study aim at fitting an appropriate count Regression model to the confirmed, active and critical cases of COVID-19 in Nigeria after 118 days. The data for the study was extracted from the daily COVID-19 cases update released by the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) online database from February 28th, 2020 – 6th, July 2020. The extracted data were used in the simulation of Poisson, Negative Binomial, and Generalized Poisson Regression model with a program written in STATA version 14 and fitted to the data at a 5% significance level. The best model was selected based on the values of -2logL, AIC, and BIC selection test/criteria. The results obtained from the analysis revealed that the Poisson regression could not capture over-dispersion, so other forms of Poisson Regression models such as the Negative Binomial Regression and Generalized Poisson Regression were used in the estimation. Of the three count Regression models, Generalized Poisson Regression was the best model for fitting daily cumulative confirmed, active and critical COVID-19 cases in Nigeria when overdispersion is present in the predictors because it had the least -2log-Likelihood, AIC, and BIC. It was also discovered that active and critical cases have a positive and significant effect on the number of COVID-19 related deaths in Nigeria.

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COVID-19 has remained and continued to be a severe pandemic threatening the present and future health stability of all the countries, the West African Countries inclusive. The challenge to avert the threat by modeling the reported cases in each of these West African Countries becomes needful for future planning and a K. Ayinde (B) •

Seemingly unrelated regression model developed to handle the problem of correlation among the error terms of a system of the regression equations is still not without a challenge, where each regression equation must satisfy the assumptions of the standard regression model. When dealing with time-series data, some of these assumptions, especially that of independence of the regressors and error terms leading to multicollinearity and autocorrelation respectively, are often violated. This study examined the effects of correlation between the error terms and autocorrelation on the performance of seven estimators and identify the estimator that yields the most preferred estimates under the separate or joint influence of the two correlation effects considered by the researcher. A two-equation model was considered, in which the first equation had multicollinearity and autocorrelation problems while the second one had no correlation problem. The error terms of the two equations were also correlated. The levels of correlation between the error terms and autocorrelation were specified between -1 and +1 at interval of 0.2 except when it approached unity.