Abstract
As reported by the World Health Organization (WHO), the world is currently facing a devastating pandemic of a novel coronavirus (COVID-19), which started as an outbreak of pneumonia of unknown cause in the Wuhan city of China in December 2019. Since then, the respiratory disease has exponentially spread to over 210 countries. By the end of April, COVID-19 had caused over three million confirmed cases of infections and over 200,000 fatalities globally. The trend poses a huge threat to global public health. Understanding the early transmission dynamics of the infection and evaluating the effectiveness of control measures is crucial for assessing the potential for sustained transmission to occur in new areas. We employed a SEIHQRD delay differential mathematical transmission model with reported Kenyan data on cases of COVID-19 to estimate how transmission varies over time and which population to target for mass testing. The model is concise in structure, and successfully captures the course of the COVID-19 outbreak, and thus sheds light on understanding the trends of the outbreak and the vulnerable populations. The results show that, the government should target population in the informal settlement for mass testing and provide affordable sanitizers and clean water to this population. The model results also indicate that people with pre-existing non-communicable diseases (NCDs) should be identified and given special medical care. Given the absence of vaccine at the moment, non-pharmaceutical intervention is needed to effectively reduce the final epidemic size.
Highlights
The world is currently facing a devastating pandemic of a novel coronavirus (COVID-19), which started as an outbreak of pneumonia of unknown cause in the Wuhan city of ChinaR
The number of deaths associated with COVID-19 greatly exceed those due to the other two corona viruses, and the outbreak is still ongoing, which poses a huge threat to the global public health and economices [13,18]
We applied the SEIHCRD compartmental delay differential model to the daily reported cases of COVID-19 to estimate the transmission dynamics of COVID-19 and determine which population to target for mass testing in Kenyan population
Summary
The world is currently facing a devastating pandemic of a novel coronavirus (COVID-19), which started as an outbreak of pneumonia of unknown cause in the Wuhan city of China. The disease has killed many, altered the definition of normalcy and collapsed economies since it was first reported It had infected over 53 million people by early November 2020 with the total number of deaths standing at over one million and that of recoveries at over 37 million and had affected 213 countries worldwide according world health organization [22]. The model described the interaction among the bats and unknown hosts, among the peoples and the infections reservoir which was further improved by considering optimal control [17,19] used an age-structured susceptible-exposed-infected-removed (SEIR) model to predict the trajectory of COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, their projections showed that physical distancing measures were most effective if the staggered return to work started at the beginning of April. Our model is a preliminary conceptual model, intending to lay a foundation for further modelling studies, but we can tune our model so that the outcomes of our model are in line with previous studies [3,4,5,8,15,26]
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