Transmission Dynamics and Control of COVID-19 Pandemic: A Mathematical Modelling Study

Background: The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic remains a major global public health concern. It is assumed that the COVID-19 outbreak originated in Wuhan, China and spread worldwide as a result of international travel. Here, I used data from China to assess the impact of contact rate for COVID-19 transmission and decay of transmission rate due to implemented interventions for disease control. Method: I developed a generalized susceptible-exposed-infectious-recovered (SEIR) compartmental model based on the disease clinical progression and interventions to explore the transmission dynamics of the global COVID-19 pandemic. I computed the basic reproduction number from the model to assess the epidemiology of the disease. Results: I found that the number of asymptomatic was higher than symptomatic cases, and that COVID19 transmission is directly linked with contact rate between infectious and susceptible individuals. It shows that at high contact rate, disease peaked in a short period of time, and doubling time decrease with increasing contact rate. The curve of COVID-19 transmission was found to flatten with increasing decay of transmission rate due to interventions that have been implemented. The basic reproduction number computed in this study without intervention at the contact rate of 1.137 day-1 was found to be 4.9976, suggesting that the number of secondary cases resulted from introduction of a single infectious individual into naive susceptible population was increasing. At the decay transmission rate of 0.02 day-1, the basic reproduction number was 0.4534 and 0.04113 at the decay transmission rate of 0.04 day-1, implying that disease can be controlled with implementation of interventions. Conclusion: The study shows that COVID-19 transmission was amplified by high contact rates between infectious and susceptible individuals, and that asymptomatic individuals might be super spreaders of the disease. It shows that the number of cases decreases with increasing decay of transmission rate due to earlier implementation of interventions.

• Publication year

  2020

• Venue

  American Journal of Biomedical Science & Research

• Publication date

  2020-09-16

• Fields of study

  Mathematics, Medicine, Environmental Science, Computer Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.34297/AJBSR.2020.10.001508
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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