Prediction on Covid-19 epidemic for different countries: Focusing on South Asia under various precautionary measures

Abstract

The coronavirus disease 2019 , which emerged from Wuhan, China, is now a pandemic, affecting across the globe. Government of different countries have developed and adopted various policies to contain this epidemic and the most common were the social distancing and lockdown. We proposed a SEIR epidemic model that accommodates the effects of lockdown and individual based precautionary measures and used it to estimate model parameters from the epidemic data up to 2nd April, 2020, freely available in GitHub repository for COVID-19, for nine developed and developing countries. We used the estimated parameters to predict the disease burden in these countries with special emphasis on India, Bangladesh and Pakistan. Our analysis revealed that the lockdown and recommended individual hygiene can slow down the outbreak but unable to eradicate the disease from the society. With the current human-to-human transmission rate and existing level of personal precautionary, the number of infected individuals in India will be increasing at least for the next 3 months and the peak will come in 5 months. We can, however, reduce the epidemic size and prolong the time to arrive epidemic peak by seriously following the measures suggested by the authorities. We need to wait for another one month to obtain more data and epidemiological parameters for giving a better prediction about the pandemic. It is to be mentioned that research community is working for drugs and/ or vaccines against COVID19 and the presence of such pharmaceutical interventions will significantly alter the results.

Monitoring COVID-19 related public Interest and population Health Literacy in South Asia: An Internet Search-Interest Based Model

“…These countries are either completely sea locked or sparsely populated and completely sealed their international border, which may have contributed low COVID-19 infections compared with their neighbors. 30,31 According to the WHO's report on the 11th March 2020, that the outbreak of COVID-19 meets the criteria for a global pandemic and people's interest started to increase in all south-Asian Countries. However, People in India and Pakistan had a faster response speed toward COVID-19 than Bangladesh which is likely to be related to the number of local cases and lower virulence to COVID-19.…”

COVID-19 Outbreak Situations in Bangladesh: An Empirical Analysis

“…Recently, Islam et al (2020) proposed a model to 3 measure the risk of infectious disease and predict the risk of COVID-19 transmission using Bangladesh data along with other four countries-United States, Australia, Canada and China. Paul et al (2020) proposed a SEIR epidemic model that accommodates the effects of lockdown and individual based precautionary measures and used it to estimate model parameters from the epidemic data for three south asian countries-Bangladesh, India and Pakistan. Paul et al (2020) used Bangladesh data up to 2nd April, 2020 by which, Bangladesh has only 95 infection cases and 9 deaths.…”

“…Paul et al (2020) proposed a SEIR epidemic model that accommodates the effects of lockdown and individual based precautionary measures and used it to estimate model parameters from the epidemic data for three south asian countries-Bangladesh, India and Pakistan. Paul et al (2020) used Bangladesh data up to 2nd April, 2020 by which, Bangladesh has only 95 infection cases and 9 deaths. However, their prediction model for Bangladesh may not give reasonable results because of sufficiently small sample.…”

Breaking the back of COVID-19: Is Bangladesh doing enough testing?

“…For instance, Khan and Hossain (2020a) analyzed global data and concluded that cumulative number of tests is not an important variable to predict the number of infections. Other studies on COVID-19 in Bangladesh include (Khan et al, www.jBiomedAnalytics.org 2020;Islam et al, 2020b;Paul et al, 2020;Mamun and Griffiths, 2020;Shahidul et al, 2020;Anwar et al, 2020;Islam and Ayesha, 2020;Islam et al, 2020a). As of May 5, Bangladesh performed 567 tests per million people, while its South Asian neighbors India and Pakistan performed 864 and 1,007 tests per million, respectively over the same period.…”