MATERIALS AND METHODS

2.1 Data collection

The number of total confirmed cases, total confirmed deaths, and the overall recovered persons form COVID-19 until April 25, 2020 for the Middle East and top ten most affected countries were obtained from the Worldometer, which is a reference website that provides real-time statistics on different topics (https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/). All these data were further used to extract some of the related‎ epidemiological terms as follows.

2.2 Calculation of the central mortality-related‎ epidemiological terms

Based on the data obtained from the Worldometer‎, the three central mortality-related‎ epidemiological terms (i.e., CFR, DR, CDR, as well as the recovery rate (RR).‎were calculated as follows:
(Eq. 1)\(CFR=\frac{\text{Number\ of\ deaths\ in\ a\ given\ time\ period}}{\text{Number\ of\ total\ confirmed\ cases\ in\ the\ same\ time\ period}}\times 100\)
(Eq. 2)\(DR=\frac{\text{Number\ of\ total\ confirmed\ cases\ in\ a\ particular\ population\ }}{\text{Total\ size\ of\ the\ population}}\times 100\)
(Eq. 3)\(CDR=\frac{\text{Number\ of\ deaths\ }\text{in\ a\ particular\ population}}{\text{Total\ size\ of\ the\ population}}\times 100\)
(Eq. 4)\(RR=\frac{\text{Number\ of\ recovered\ persons}}{\text{Number\ of\ total\ confirmed\ cases}}\times 100\)
Microsoft Excel 2016 was applied to obtain the relevant diagrams.