Regionalizing & Partitioning Africa’s Coronavirus (COVID-19) Fatalities Using Environmental Factors and Underlying Health Conditions for Social-economic Impacts

Abstract

The COVID-19 event was unexpected and has had shocking impacts such as widespread economic losses and tens of thousands of deaths. The COVID-19 infection rate is relatively low in Africa compared to other continents, but the number of cases is rising. As of July 12, 2020, in Africa, there are a total of 13,194 deaths and 591,153 reported cases. The dynamics of this pandemic spread are relatively unknown; however, previous studies have established a relationship between poor air quality standards due to nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and COVID-19 deaths and cases. Meanwhile, other studies have linked preexisting health conditions from cardiovascular diseases with COVID-19 fatalities. However, none of these studies have examined these indicators from socio-economic and strategic planning perspectives. The primary aim of this paper is to combine and cluster these two air qualities indicators, preexisting heart conditions due to morbidity and mortality from cardiovascular disease (MMDC), the probability from dying from four main (cardiovascular diseases, cancer, chronic respiratory diseases, and diabetes) non-communicable diseases (NCDs) using a self-organizing map (SOM) and the hierarchical clustering method (HCM). Using SOM and HCM, all the variables mentioned above were partitioned into five clusters that did not follow the geographical boundaries of five regions in Africa. The results show that the countries with the highest COVID-19 deaths and cases as of 12 July 2020 are Egypt (3769 and 81,158) and South Africa (3971 and 264,184). The SOM technique was successfully used to combine these two countries into a single cluster. Notably, these two countries also have high rates of pre-existing health conditions (MMDC, NCDs), poor air quality indicators (NO2 and PM2.5) and pollution levels. Since no single country can manage this pandemic alone, a concerted effort is needed to mitigate and combat this virus. Therefore, relating these indicators together at the continental level would help improve state-of-the-art planning and management of the COVID-19 pandemic in Africa.