SARS-COV-2 outbreak and control in Kenya - Mathematical model analysis

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic reached Kenya in March 2020 with the initial cases reported in the capital city Nairobi and in the coastal area Mombasa. As reported by the World Health Organization, the outbreak of COVID-19 has spread across the world, killed many, collapsed economies and changed the way people live since it was first reported in Wuhan, China, in the end of 2019. As at the end of December 2020, it had led to over 2.8 million confirmed cases in Africa with over 67 thousand deaths. The trend poses a huge threat to global public health. Understanding the early transmission dynamics of the infection and evaluating the effectiveness of control measures is crucial for assessing the potential for sustained transmission to occur in new areas. We employed a SEIHCRD mathematical transmission model with reported Kenyan data on cases of COVID-19 to estimate how transmission varies over time. The model is concise in structure, and successfully captures the course of the COVID-19 outbreak, and thus sheds light on understanding the trends of the outbreak. The next generation matrix approach was adopted to calculate the basic reproduction number (R(0)) from the model to assess the factors driving the infection. The model illustrates the effect of mass testing on COVID-19 as well as individual self initiated behavioral change. The results have significant impact on the management of COVID-19 and implementation of prevention policies. The results from the model analysis shows that aggressive and effective mass testing as well as individual self initiated behaviour change play a big role in getting rid of the COVID-19 epidemic otherwise the rate of infection will continue to increase despite the increased rate of recovery.