ArticleInfectious diseases of poverty2020
Estimation of exponential growth rate and basic reproduction number of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in Africa.
Article in Infectious diseases of poverty, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 57 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Who cites it
57 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Preparedness of the Ghana Health Service for field epidemiology and applied biostatistics: a systematic review of infectious disease surveillance, outbreak investigation methodologies, and statistical modeling capacities in resource-limited settings.Frontiers in public health · 2026Pooled it
- Assessment of basic reproductive number for COVID-19 at global level: A meta-analysis.Medicine · 2021Pooled it
- Estimation of the exponential growth rate of an epidemic.Infectious Disease Modelling · 2026Article
- Enhancing time-varying reproduction number estimates for COVID-19 with behavior and surveillance data in South Korea, 2020-2022.Archives of public health = Archives belges de sante publique · 2026Article
- Evaluation and estimation of epidemic trajectories for SARS-CoV-2 from clinical and wastewater data in Gauteng Province, South Africa.PLOS global public health · 2026Article
- Mathematical models to characterize the early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic in New Mexico, USA.Mathematical biosciences and engineering : MBE · 2025Article
- Distribution and determinants of COVID-19 seroprevalence in a hard-to-access health district in Mali.PLOS global public health · 2025Article
- Assessing the long-term persistence of SARS-CoV-2 in Guinea: insights from post-epidemic sentinel syndromic surveillance data.Frontiers in epidemiology · 2025Article
- A novel approach to estimatingFrontiers in public health · 2025Article
- Basic Reproduction Number (R0), Doubling Time, and Daily Growth Rate of the COVID-19 Epidemic: An Echological Study.Archives of academic emergency medicine · 2024Article
- Transmissibility and severity of COVID-19 in a humanitarian setting: First few X investigation of cases and contacts in Juba, South Sudan, 2020.Influenza and other respiratory viruses · 2023Article
- Estimation of epidemiological parameters and ascertainment rate from early transmission of COVID-19 across Africa.Royal Society open science · 2023Article
- Epidemiological inference for emerging viruses using segregating sites.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Fractional study of the Covid-19 model with different types of transmissions.Kuwait journal of science · 2023Article
- Observed versus estimated actual trend of COVID-19 case numbers in Cameroon: A data-driven modelling.Infectious Disease Modelling · 2023Article
- A hierarchical Bayesian approach for modeling the evolution of the 7-day moving average of the number of deaths by COVID-19.Journal of applied statistics · 2023Article
- Article
- Effect of sojourn time distributions on the early dynamics of COVID-19 outbreak.Nonlinear dynamics · 2023Article
- Article
- A vaccination model for COVID-19 in Gauteng, South Africa.Infectious Disease Modelling · 2022Article
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundSince the first case of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in Africa was detected on February 14, 2020, the cumulative confirmations reached 15 207 including 831 deaths by April 13, 2020. Africa has been described as one of the most vulnerable region with the COVID-19 infection during the initial phase of the outbreak, due to the fact that Africa is a great commercial partner of China and some other EU and American countries. Which result in large volume of travels by traders to the region more frequently and causing African countries face even bigger health threat during the COVID-19 pandemic. Furthermore, the fact that the control and management of COVID-19 pandemic rely heavily on a country's health care system, and on average Africa has poor health care system which make it more vulnerable indicating a need for timely intervention to curtail the spread. In this paper, we estimate the exponential growth rate and basic reproduction number (R
methodsWe analyzed the initial phase of the epidemic of COVID-19 in Africa between 1 March and 13 April 2020, by using the simple exponential growth model. We examined the publicly available materials published by the WHO situation report to show the potential of COVID-19 to spread without sustaining strict health measures. The Poisson likelihood framework is adopted for data fitting and parameter estimation. We modelled the distribution of COVID-19 generation interval (GI) as Gamma distributions with a mean of 4.7 days and standard deviation of 2.9 days estimated from previous work, and compute the basic reproduction number.
resultsWe estimated the exponential growth rate as 0.22 per day (95% CI: 0.20-0.24), and the basic reproduction number, R
conclusionsThe initial growth of COVID-19 cases in Africa was rapid and showed large variations across countries. Our estimates should be useful in preparedness planning against further spread of the COVID-19 epidemic in Africa.
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