Modeling the Impact of Lock-down on COVID-19 Spread in Malaysia

Abstract

After a breakdown notified in Wuhan, China in December 2019, COVID-19 is declared as pandemic diseases. To the date more than 13 million confirmed cases and more than half a million are dead around the world. This virus also attached Malaysia in its immature stage where 8718 cases were confirmed and 122 were declared as death. Malaysia responsibly controlled the spread by enforcing MCO. Hence, it is required to visualize the pattern of Covid-19 spread. Also, it is necessary to estimate the impact of the enforced prevention measures. In this paper, an infectious disease dynamic modeling (SEIR) is used to estimate the epidemic spread in Malaysia. The main assumption is to update the reproduction number Rt with respect to the implemented prevention measures. For a time-frame of five month, the Rt was assumed to vary between 2.9 and 0.3. Moreover, the manuscript includes two possible scenarios: the first will be the extension of the stricter measures all over the country, and the second will be the gradual lift of the lock-down. After implementing several stages of lock-down we have found that the estimated values of the Rt with respect to the strictness degree varies between 0.2 to 1.1. A continuous strict lock-down may reduce the Rt to 0.2 and accordingly the estimated active cases will be reduced to 20 by the beginning of September 2020. In contrast, the second scenario considers a gradual lift of the enforced prevention measures by the end of June 2020, here we have considered three possible outcomes according to the MCO relaxation. Thus, the estimated values of Rt = 0.7, 0.9, 1.1, which shows a rapid increase in the number of active cases. The implemented SEIR model shows a close resemblance with the actual data recorded from 10, March till 7, July 2020.

The Epidemiology of COVID-19 in Malaysia

“…R t increase in this period is insidious as the transmission is constrained by low-intensity NPI. [44][45][46] . R t in this period peaks in mid-September 2020 before it slowly declines to correspond to an intensification of NPI in October 2020.…”

A data driven change-point epidemic model for assessing the impact of large gathering and subsequent movement control order on COVID-19 spread in Malaysia

“…A change-point is incorporated into the modified SEIR model to capture the shift in disease dynamics before and after the start of the MCO. Several works in the COVID literature have incorporated change-points to study the effectiveness of interventions; see, for example, [24][25][26]. To incorporate our change-point, an unknown threshold date, T � , is chosen so that observed daily cases fall either to the left or right of T � .…”

Structural Zero Data of COVID-19 Discovers Exodus Probabilities

“…This article (PMID 32617314) discusses the trajectory in detail about the trajectory in various countries. The reader is referred to 1,3,4,[8][9][10][11][12][14][15][16][17] for recent epidemiological and public health developments on collected data, including the Malaysian data that are analyzed and interpreted in this article. The outcome of their online anonymous survey is summarized in Table 1 through 3.…”

“…The reader is referred to the classic book by 18 for the fundamental concepts and rules of probability in the interpretations of scientific data. We now introduce a probability type measure in (1).…”