Trend and Epidemiological Analysis of Coronavirus in Nigeria

Abstract

Nigeria is the most populous country in Africa and it’s among the countries where the novel corona virus is highly endemic. World Health Organization listed Nigeria among other 13 African countries identified as high-risk for the spread of the virus. Hence the need to observe the six geopolitical zones in Nigeria, in other to study the trend of the virus and also look at some the epidemiological measures based on the case records of adult patients above 16 years with Corona virus admitted between February 2020 and February 2021. The research work tries to analyze the epidemiological measures of the COVID-19 using the Case Fatality Rate (CFR), Infection Fatality Rate (IFR), Mortality Rate (MR) and Incidence Rate (IR) and also to analyze the trend of death across the six geopolitical zones in Nigeria. The analysis of the epidemiological measure shows a wide variation in CFR among the six geopolitical zones, it’s an indication that it disproportionately affected states like Lagos and Abuja which are the most affluent. The result from IFR shows that the North-East has the highest infection rate at 4.88% while South-West has the least at 1.53%. MR shows south west with the highest population and highest death recorded of 11% while south-East has the lowest death rate. The incidence rate was lowest in North-East at 2.3% and highest in the South-West at 18.93%, studying this incidence rate of the six geopolitical zone one can conclude that the occupation and the economic activities of the zones really influenced the rates. The trend analysis of death across the six zones shows the South East has a perfect fitted polynomial series of order four model.