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The highly infectious COVID-19 critically affected the world that has stuck millions of citizens in their homes to avoid possible spreading of the disease. Researchers in different fields are continually working to develop vaccines and prevention strategies. However, an accurate forecast of the outbreak can help control the pandemic until a vaccine is available. Several machine learning and deep learning-based approaches are available to forecast the confirmed cases, but they lack the optimized temporal component and nonlinearity. To enhance the current forecasting frameworks' capability, we proposed optimized long short-term memory networks (LSTM) to forecast COVID-19 cases and reduce mean absolute error. For the optimization of LSTM, we applied bat algorithm. Furthermore, to tackle the premature convergence and local minima problem of BA, we proposed an enhanced variant of BA. The proposed version utilized Gaussian adaptive inertia weight to control the individual velocity in the entire swarm. In addition, we substitute random walk with the Gaussian walk to observe the local search mechanism. The proposed LSTM examines the personal best solution with the swarm's local best and preserves the optimal solution by combining the Gaussian walk. To evaluate the optimized LSTM, we compared it with the non-optimal version of LSTM, recurrent neural network, gated recurrent units, and other recent state-of-the-art algorithms. The experimental results prove the superiority of the optimized LSTM over other recent algorithms by obtaining 99.52 % accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]