The heterogeneous severity of COVID-19 in African countries: A modeling approach

Abstract

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic has had a considerable impact on global health and economics. The impact in African countries has not been investigated through fitting epidemic models to the reported COVID-19 deaths.Method: We downloaded data for the twelve most affected countries with the highest cumulative COVID-19 deaths to estimate the time-varying basic reproductive number (R0(t)) and infection attack rate (IAR). We developed a simple epidemic model and fitted the model to reported COVID-19 deaths in twelve African countries using iterated filtering and allowing a flexible transmission rate.Results: We observed high heterogeneity in the case-fatality rate across countries, which may be due to different reporting or testing efforts. South Africa, Tunisia, and Libya were affected most strongly, exhibiting a relatively higher(R0(t)) and infection attack rate.Conclusion: To effectively control the spread of COVID-19 epidemics in Africa, there is a need to consider other mitigation strategies (such as improvements in socioeconomic well-being, healthcare systems, the water supply, and awareness campaigns).

Analysis of a COVID-19 Epidemic Model with Seasonality

“…There are many mathematical models of COVID-19 with the compartmental structure describing the size of populations within different classes (see Xue et al 2020;Yan et al 2020;Liu et al 2021;Musa et al 2022;Wang et al 2022;Zou et al 2022;Zhou et al 2022;Zhang and Li 2021;Tang et al 2020a, b;Yang et al 2020;Zhang et al 2020;Munayco et al 2020;Liu et al 2020;Lauer et al 2020;Kuniya 2020;Hu et al 2020;Gatto et al 2020). Xue et al (2020) presented a datadriven network model to capture the contact heterogeneity between individuals.…”

Estimation of Epidemiological Parameters and Ascertainment Rate from Early Transmission of COVID-19 across Africa

“…The COVID-19 transmission in Africa has been studied in several aspects: the basic reproduction number in the initial phase was estimated for selected countries in Africa using a mechanistic model with a Bayesian inference framework 16 , phenomenological models 17 , and exponential growth rate 18 , time-varying effective reproduction number and infection attack rate were also estimated 19 , the effect of different lockdown and control strategies on COVID-19 transmission in African and West African countries was assessed 20,21 , the spatio-temporal dynamics of COVID-19 within the first 62 days on the continent 22 was investigated and the preparedness and vulnerability of African countries against imported cases were evaluated 23 . There have also been estimations of under-ascertainment of COVID-19 infections in many locations around the world by various methods [24][25][26][27] .…”