The Heterogeneous Severity of COVID-19 in African Countries: A Modeling Approach.

Salihu Sabiu Musa,Nafiu Hussaini,Shi Zhao,Daihai He,Weiming Wang,Xueying Wang,Shudong Li

doi:10.1007/s11538-022-00992-x

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a considerable impact on global health and economics. The impact in African countries has not been investigated thoroughly via fitting epidemic models to the reported COVID-19 deaths. We downloaded the data for the 12 most-affected countries with the highest cumulative COVID-19 deaths to estimate the time-varying basic reproductive number ({R}_{0}(t)) and infection attack rate. We develop a simple epidemic model and fitted it to reported COVID-19 deaths in 12 African countries using iterated filtering and allowing a flexible transmission rate. We observe high heterogeneity in the case-fatality rate across the countries, which may be due to different reporting or testing efforts. South Africa, Tunisia, and Libya were most affected, exhibiting a relatively higher {R}_{0}(t) and infection attack rate. Thus, 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).Supplementary InformationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11538-022-00992-x.

Highlights

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), a novel coronavirus that has caused the current coronavirus disease pandemic (COVID-19), has strongly affected all regions, including Africa
In the early phase of the epidemic, the 12 most-affected African countries with COVID-19 deaths were classified into three clusters/groups based on their similarity in exposure risk that originated from three Chinese provinces, namely Guangdong, Fujian, and Beijing, which represented three different levels of risks of importation (Gilbert et al 2020; Musa et al 2021a)
Algeria, and South Africa were identified as the highest importation risk groups with moderate to high magnitudes of high epidemic response, followed by Nigeria, Ethiopia, Sudan, Morocco, and Kenya, which were classified as moderate importation risk groups with variable magnitudes of response to epidemics with high vulnerability

Summary

Introduction

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), a novel coronavirus that has caused the current coronavirus disease pandemic (COVID-19), has strongly affected all regions, including Africa. The disease, caused by SARS-CoV-2, emerged in China at the end of 2019 and has affected more than 282.8 million individuals and killed over 5.4 million people globally by December 27, 2021 (World Health Organization 2021a). In the early phase of the epidemic, the 12 most-affected African countries with COVID-19 deaths were classified into three clusters/groups based on their similarity in exposure risk that originated from three Chinese provinces, namely Guangdong, Fujian, and Beijing, which represented three different levels of risks of importation (high, medium, and relatively low) (Gilbert et al 2020; Musa et al 2021a). The last group includes Tunisia, Cameroon, and Zambia, classified as having relatively low importation risk with variable magnitude to respond to epidemics with high vulnerability (Gilbert et al 2020; World Health Organization 2021b)

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Conclusion