Abstract
Background: By February 2021, the overall impact of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in South and Southeast Asia was relatively mild. Surprisingly, in early April 2021, the second wave significantly impacted the population and garnered widespread international attention.Methods: This study focused on the nine countries with the highest cumulative deaths from the disease as of August 17, 2021. We look at COVID-19 transmission dynamics in South and Southeast Asia using the reported death data, which fits a mathematical model with a time-varying transmission rate.Results: We estimated the transmission rate, infection fatality rate (IFR), infection attack rate (IAR), and the effects of vaccination in the nine countries in South and Southeast Asia. Our study suggested that the IAR is still low in most countries, and increased vaccination is required to prevent future waves.Conclusion: Implementing non-pharmacological interventions (NPIs) could have helped South and Southeast Asia keep COVID-19 under control in 2020, as demonstrated in our estimated low-transmission rate. We believe that the emergence of the new Delta variant, social unrest, and migrant workers could have triggered the second wave of COVID-19.
Highlights
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-2019) invaded the world unexpectedly in 2019 and changed human life tremendously [1]
The SARS-CoV-2 virus is transmitted via respiratory droplets with an incubation period of 2–14 days [2]
Where v(s) represent the vaccination rate per capita among all population per day. When we incorporated this effective vaccination rate, we considered a delay of 2 weeks (τ ) for the vaccine to take effect and uniform vaccine efficacy of η =85%
Summary
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-2019) (caused by SARS-CoV-2) invaded the world unexpectedly in 2019 and changed human life tremendously [1]. Ever since the WHO declared the disease a pandemic on March 11, 2020 [3], there have been 199.67 million confirmed cases worldwide, and more than 4 million deaths were reported [4] as of August 4, 2021. Coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic in South Asia (SA) and Southeast Asia (SEA) was mild in 2020 compared with other hot spots such as Europe or North America (see Figure 1). By February 2021, the overall impact of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in South and Southeast Asia was relatively mild. In early April 2021, the second wave significantly impacted the population and garnered widespread international attention
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