Department of Mathematics and Institute of Applied Mathematics, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada.
School of Mathematics, Statistics & Computer Science, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa.
PLoS One. 2022 Feb 25;17(2):e0264455. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0264455. eCollection 2022.
The pandemic of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) took the world by surprise. Following the first outbreak of COVID-19 in December 2019, several models have been developed to study and understand its transmission dynamics. Although the spread of COVID-19 is being slowed down by vaccination and other interventions, there is still a need to have a clear understanding of the evolution of the pandemic across countries, states and communities. To this end, there is a need to have a clearer picture of the initial spread of the disease in different regions. In this project, we used a simple SEIR model and a Bayesian inference framework to estimate the basic reproduction number of COVID-19 across Africa. Our estimates vary between 1.98 (Sudan) and 9.66 (Mauritius), with a median of 3.67 (90% CrI: 3.31-4.12). The estimates provided in this paper will help to inform COVID-19 modeling in the respective countries/regions.
严重急性呼吸综合征冠状病毒 2 (SARS-CoV-2) 的大流行让全世界猝不及防。自 2019 年 12 月 COVID-19 首次爆发以来，已经开发了几种模型来研究和了解其传播动态。尽管 COVID-19 的传播速度因疫苗接种和其他干预措施而减缓，但仍需要清楚地了解各国、各州和社区的大流行演变。为此，需要更清楚地了解疾病在不同地区的初始传播情况。在这个项目中，我们使用了一个简单的 SEIR 模型和贝叶斯推断框架来估计非洲各地 COVID-19 的基本繁殖数。我们的估计值在 1.98（苏丹）和 9.66（毛里求斯）之间，中位数为 3.67（90% CrI：3.31-4.12）。本文提供的估计数将有助于为各自国家/地区的 COVID-19 建模提供信息。
