Sriwijaya Journal of Environment (Aug 2020)
Analysing secondary infections of Coronavirus Disease 2019 across the Geopolitical zones of Nigeria using estimated time dependent reproduction number
Abstract
Time dependent reproduction number (TD – R0) is a measure of secondary infections or transmissibility of a disease useful in monitoring changes in the rate of infection and assessing policies put in place to control the spread of a disease. In this study we used daily infections situation report of COVID – 19 published by the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) to estimate Nigeria’s TD – R0 and then repeated the same for the six geo – political zones in the country. Estimates of TD – R0 values for the country from the 23rd of March – 27th of May 2020 fluctuated with a maximum of 2.3 (95% CrI) on the 19th of April and a minimum of 0.83 (95% CrI) on the 16th May 2020. Despite the decline in TD – R0 since the early stages of the outbreak of COVID – 19 in Nigeria suggesting a fall in the expected rate of secondary infection apart from the northwest and the northeast geo – political zones values remain above 1.0 for other zones and the country, generally. The Kolmogorov – Smirnov (KS) test was used to test the null hypothesis stating that the means of TD – R0 across the geo-political zones does not follow the same distribution pattern. After making adjustments for Type 1 – error we accepted the null hypothesis (p < 0.05) for six pairs of geo-political zones. We conclude that our findings are significant in studying the COVID – 19 epidemic in Nigeria and important in evaluating the strategies deployed by governments at the national and regional levels, thus, the same method can be replicated across Africa.
