SARS-CoV-2 variants-associated outbreaks of COVID-19 in a tertiary institution, North-Central Nigeria: Implications for epidemic control

Abstract

The COVID-19 global pandemic is being driven by evolving SARS-CoV-2 variants with consequential implications on virus transmissibility, host immunity, and disease severity. Continuous molecular and genomic surveillance of the SARS-CoV-2 variants is therefore necessary for public health interventions toward the management of the pandemic. This study is a retrospective analysis of COVID-19 cases reported in a Nigerian tertiary institution from July to December 2021. In total, 705 suspected COVID-19 cases that comprised 547 students and 158 non-students were investigated by real time PCR (RT-PCR); of which 372 (~52.8%) tested positive for COVID-19. Using a set of selection criteria, 74 (~19.9%) COVID-19 positive samples were selected for next generation sequencing. Data showed that there were two outbreaks of COVID-19 within the university community over the study period, during which more females (56.8%) tested positive than males (47.8%) (p<0.05). Clinical data together with phylogenetic analysis suggested community transmission of SARS-CoV-2 through mostly asymptomatic and/or pre-symptomatic individuals. Confirmed COVID-19 cases were mostly mild, however, SARS-CoV-2 delta (77%) and omicron (4.1%) variants were implicated as major drivers of respective waves of infections during the study period. This study highlights the importance of integrated surveillance of communicable disease during outbreaks.

An Estimate of Time-Dependent Transmission of COVID-19 Pandemic in Katsina State from June to November 2021

“…This information is represented in Figure 5. (Badmus et al, 2023;Omede et al, 2023;Onwube et al, 2023;Adeyemi et al, 2023;Moroh et al, 2023;Taiwo et al, 2023) and elsewhere around the world (Triambak et al, 2023;Jameel et al, 2023;Mitra et al, 2023) focusing on understanding the behaviour of the disease through modelling, reproduction metrics, risk factors and other research approaches.…”

“…Figure 6: Mean values of Rt over the weekly sliding windows and a 95% Confidence Interval DISCUSSION Evolution of the COVID-19 virus poses serious challenges to prevention, control and mitigation strategies, with several variants identified through different waves of the pandemic and recent research efforts in Nigeria(Badmus et al, 2023;Omede et al, 2023;Onwube et al, 2023;Adeyemi et al, 2023;Moroh et al, 2023;Taiwo et al, 2023) and elsewhere around the world(Triambak et al, 2023;Jameel et al, 2023;Mitra et al, 2023) focusing on understanding the behaviour of the disease through modelling, reproduction metrics, risk factors and other research approaches. In this paper, we investigated the transmission of the disease using time-varying reproduction number (Rt) metric and studied the effect of age and gender as risk factors during the third wave of the pandemic in Katsina state.…”

Dental research related to COVID-19 in Brazil: research presented at the 38th SBPqO Meeting

“…6 In 2023 there are COVID-19 vaccines, however, the pandemic is still ongoing with outbreaks of infection caused by variants of interest emerging across the world, with impact on the provision of dental care and research. [7][8][9] Recent evidence has highlighted Brazilian contribution to dental research: Brazil has ranked second in the number of international publications in Dentistry for over fifteen years and ranked second in citations in 2017. 10 Held in Brazil, the Annual Meeting of the Brazilian Division of the International Association for Dental Research -Sociedade Brasileira de Pesquisa Odontológica (SBPqO), is the largest dental research conference in Latin America.…”