Measuring Time-Varying Effective Reproduction Numbers for COVID-19 and Their Relationship with Movement Control Order in Malaysia.

To curb the spread of SARS-CoV-2 virus (COVID-19) in Malaysia, the government imposed a nationwide movement control order (MCO) from 18 March 2020 to 3 May 2020. It was enforced in four phases (i.e., MCO 1, MCO 2, MCO 3 and MCO 4). In this paper, we propose an initiative to assess the impact of MCO by using time-varying reproduction number (). We used data from the Johns Hopkins University Centre for Systems Science and Engineering Coronavirus repository. Day 1 was taken from the first assumed local transmission of COVID-19. We estimated by using the package and plotted the epidemic curve and . Then, we extracted the mean at day 1, day 5 and day 10 for all MCO phases and compared the differences. The values peaked around day 43, which was shortly before the start of MCO 1. The means for at day 1, day 5, and day 10 for all MCOs ranged between 0.665 and 1.147. The average gradually decreased in MCO 1 and MCO 2. Although spikes in the number of confirmed cases were observed when restrictions were gradually relaxed in the later MCO phases, the situation remained under control with values being stabilised to below unity level ( value less than one).