Abstract
BackgroundSince the first case of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in Africa was detected on February 14, 2020, the cumulative confirmations reached 15 207 including 831 deaths by April 13, 2020. Africa has been described as one of the most vulnerable region with the COVID-19 infection during the initial phase of the outbreak, due to the fact that Africa is a great commercial partner of China and some other EU and American countries. Which result in large volume of travels by traders to the region more frequently and causing African countries face even bigger health threat during the COVID-19 pandemic. Furthermore, the fact that the control and management of COVID-19 pandemic rely heavily on a country’s health care system, and on average Africa has poor health care system which make it more vulnerable indicating a need for timely intervention to curtail the spread. In this paper, we estimate the exponential growth rate and basic reproduction number (R0) of COVID-19 in Africa to show the potential of the virus to spread, and reveal the importance of sustaining stringent health measures to control the disease in Africa.MethodsWe analyzed the initial phase of the epidemic of COVID-19 in Africa between 1 March and 13 April 2020, by using the simple exponential growth model. We examined the publicly available materials published by the WHO situation report to show the potential of COVID-19 to spread without sustaining strict health measures. The Poisson likelihood framework is adopted for data fitting and parameter estimation. We modelled the distribution of COVID-19 generation interval (GI) as Gamma distributions with a mean of 4.7 days and standard deviation of 2.9 days estimated from previous work, and compute the basic reproduction number.ResultsWe estimated the exponential growth rate as 0.22 per day (95% CI: 0.20–0.24), and the basic reproduction number, R0, as 2.37 (95% CI: 2.22–2.51) based on the assumption that the exponential growth starting from 1 March 2020. With an R0 at 2.37, we quantified the instantaneous transmissibility of the outbreak by the time-varying effective reproductive number to show the potential of COVID-19 to spread across African region.ConclusionsThe initial growth of COVID-19 cases in Africa was rapid and showed large variations across countries. Our estimates should be useful in preparedness planning against further spread of the COVID-19 epidemic in Africa.
Highlights
Since early 2020, an outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), a pandemic [1,2,3], caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARSCoV-2) [1] has hit the world severely
The aim of this study is to estimate the exponential growth rate and the basic reproduction number of the COVID-19 at the early stage of the pandemic in Africa, which should be valuable in informing the official and public in the preparedness against COVID-19 spread, forecasting the trend, and highlighting the importance of sustaining strict measures in order to curtail the spread of the virus
The fitting results matched the observed daily number of cases, which implies that the early outbreak data in Africa were largely following the exponential growth rate estimated at 0.22 per day, which is slightly larger than previous estimates [7, 9, 14]
Summary
Since early 2020, an outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), a pandemic [1,2,3], caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARSCoV-2) [1] has hit the world severely. As of 13 April 2020, a total of 15 207 infected cases were reported throughout Africa, with 831 deaths, giving an overall case fatality rate (CFR) of 5.47%, among them only 3 cases reported in February 2020 [4]. Since the first case of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in Africa was detected on February 14, 2020, the cumulative confirmations reached 15 207 including 831 deaths by April 13, 2020. Africa has been described as one of the most vulnerable region with the COVID-19 infection during the initial phase of the outbreak, due to the fact that Africa is a great commercial partner of China and some other EU and American countries. Which result in large volume of travels by traders to the region more frequently and causing African countries face even bigger health threat during the COVID-19 pandemic. We estimate the exponential growth rate and basic reproduction number (R0) of COVID-19 in Africa to show the potential of the virus to spread, and reveal the importance of sustaining stringent health measures to control the disease in Africa
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