Trend analysis, modelling and impact assessment of COVID-19 in Nepal

Abstract

With continued global expansion of COVID-19 transmission and mounting threat of the disease, the timely analysis of its trend in Nepal and forecasting the potential situation in the country has been deemed necessary. We analyzed the trend, modelling and impact assessment of COVID-19 cases of Nepal from 23rd January 2020 to 30th April 2020 to portray the scenario of COVID-19 after the first phase of lockdown. Exponential smoothing state-space and autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) models were constructed to forecast the cases. Susceptible-infectious-recovered (SIR) model was fit to estimate the basic reproduction number (Ro) of COVID-19 in Nepal. There has been increase in the number of cases but the overall growth in COVID-19 was not high. Statistical modelling has shown that COVID-19 cases may continue to increase exponentially in Nepal. The basic reproduction number in Nepal being maintained at low level of 1.08 for the period of 23rd January to 30th April 2020 is an indication of effectiveness of lockdown in containing the COVID-19 spread. The models further suggest that COVID-19 might persist until December 2020 with peak cases in August 2020. On the other hand, basic reproduction number of 1.25 was computed for total cases reported for the 22nd March to 30th April 2020 period implying that COVID-19 may remain for at least for a year in the country. Thus, maintaining social distance and stay home policy with an implementation of strict lockdown in COVID-19 affected district is highly recommended.

Innovating protectives gears for frontline health professionals in the COVID-19 pandemic at a low resource setting

“…Referring to some to some of recent modelling studies (Marahatta et al, 2020;Bhandary et al, 2020), studies, it seems that we are in front of a quite risky situation. It is now high time to join hand-tohand between academia and industries focusing on Research and Development (R&D) activities, for academia, entrepreneurs and business sectors, hand to hand, to develop the essential health care tools, materials as well as and diagnostics for testing infection even under in low resource settings.…”

Teachers Understanding Towards COVID-19: A Case of Dhankuta Multiple Campus, Dhankuta, Nepal

“…The term COVID-19 was first used by the World Health Organization (WHO) on 11 Feb., 2020 and it was emerged from Wuhan of China in the late December 2019. It is considered as a novel Corona virus-(SARS CoV-2) and WHO declared COVID-19 as pandemic on 11 March 2020 (Amgai et al, 2020;Bhandary et al, 2020;. They claimed that the novel coronavirus is a single stranded RNA virus which is a zoonotic disease and has led to human infection predominantly through air droplets which is the seventh coronavirus known that infects humans (Zhu et al, 2020).…”

“…Nepal is also at the forefront of the COVID-19 crisis like other countries as the first COVID-19 case was reported on 13 January 2020 from a 32 years old male who came from Wuhan, China on 9 January 2020. He was admitted to hospital with mild symptoms related to COVID-19 but the disease was not named as COVID-19 till that time (Sapkota et al, 2020;Bhandary et al, 2020). Though, Nepal formally announced the first case on 24 January, 2020 (Pun et al, 2020).…”

“…Though, Nepal formally announced the first case on 24 January, 2020 (Pun et al, 2020). After 3 months of the first case confirmation in Nepal, the second case was found on March 23 rd , 2020 in a 19 years old female who had come from France via Doha, Qatar (Bhandary et al, 2020). Thereafter, the nationwide lockdown was implemented to prevent form COVID-19 until 24 March 2020 to 21 July 2020 (Pradhan, 2020).…”