Abstract
The spread of Omicron, a mutated version of COVID-19 across several countries is leading to the discussion of lockdown once again for curbing the spread of the new virus. In this context, this research is showing the impact of lockdown for the successful control of the COVID-19 pandemic in Saudi Arabia. The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic around the globe has affected Saudi Arabia with around 2,37,803 confirmed cases within the initial 4 months of transmission. Saudi Arabia has announced a 21-day lockdown from March 23, 2020, to reduce the transmission of the COVID-19 pandemic. Machine Learning-based, Multinomial logistic regression was applied to understand the relationship between daily COVID-19 confirmed cases and lockdown in the 17 most-affected cities of KSA. We used secondary published data from the Ministry of Health, KSA daily dataset of COVID-19 confirmed case counts. These 17 cities were categorized into 4 classes based on lockdown dates. A total of three scenarios such as night lockdown, full lockdown, and no lockdown have been analyzed with the total number of confirmed cases with 4 classes. 15 out of 17 cities have shown a strong correlation with a confidence interval of 95%. These findings provide evidence that the COVID-19 pandemic may be partially suppressed with lockdown measures.