Abstract
Background: COVID-19 has spread from China across Europe and the United States and has become a global pandemic. In countries of the Global South, due to often weaker socioeconomic options and health care systems, effective local countermeasures remain debated. Methods: We combine large-scale socioeconomic and traffic survey data with detailed agent-based simulations of local transportation to analyze COVID-19 spreading in a regional model for the Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality in South Africa under a range of countermeasure scenarios. Results: The simulations indicate that any realistic containment strategy, including those similar to the one ongoing in South Africa, may yield a manifold overload of available intensive care units. Only immediate and the most severe countermeasures, up to a complete lock-down that essentially inhibits all joint human activities, can contain the epidemic effectively. Conclusions: As South Africa exhibits rather favorable conditions compared to many other countries of the Global South, our findings constitute rough conservative estimates and may support identifying strategies towards containing COVID-19 as well as any major future pandemics in these countries.
Highlights
The first cases of the coronavirus disease COVID-19 were confirmed on December 29, 2019 in China[1]
Our research applied agent-based simulations to assess the effectiveness of countermeasures at an early stage of the COVID-19 pandemic and the following paper displays the state of literature and infection figures for the period of March and April 2020
Outbreak dynamics causes overload of the approximately intensive care unit (ICU) beds estimated as baseline for Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality (NMBM) (Figure 1E,F)
Summary
Any reports and responses or comments on the article can be found at the end of the article. Keywords COVID-19, South Africa, Countermeasure, Agent-based Simulations, Public Health. This article is included in the Emerging Diseases and Outbreaks gateway. This article is included in the Coronavirus collection. This article is included in the Max Planck Society collection
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