Download This Paper
Preprints with The Lancet is part of SSRN´s First Look, a place where journals identify content of interest prior to publication. Authors have opted in at submission to The Lancet family of journals to post their preprints on Preprints with The Lancet. The usual SSRN checks and a Lancet-specific check for appropriateness and transparency have been applied. Preprints available here are not Lancet publications or necessarily under review with a Lancet journal. These preprints are early stage research papers that have not been peer-reviewed. The findings should not be used for clinical or public health decision making and should not be presented to a lay audience without highlighting that they are preliminary and have not been peer-reviewed. For more information on this collaboration, see the comments published in The Lancet about the trial period, and our decision to make this a permanent offering, or visit The Lancet´s FAQ page, and for any feedback please contact preprints@lancet.com.
COVID-19 Transmission and Forecasting in Kuwait: A Mathematical Modeling Study
22 Pages Posted: 20 Jul 2020
More...Abstract
Developing countries are struggling to control the COVID-19 outbreak, facing shortage in testing supplies and international competition. Many countries with relatively smaller populations like Kuwait have resorted to early lockdowns and aggressive public health interventions. Kuwait had its first imported case on Feb 24, 2020. Analysis of data from the early stage of COVID-19 outbreak in Kuwait can provide important information about the potential epidemic and healthcare burdens as well as assist in evaluating the potential impact of various outbreak control measures. Such control measures are essentially implemented to achieve a sufficient reduction in the effective reproduction number during an outbreak. In this study, we use a mathematical modeling framework to simulate the outbreak dynamics of SARS-CoV-2 transmission in Kuwait and forecast the potential burden on the healthcare system. We calibrate the model against daily numbers of detected infection and death cases using a maximum likelihood framework and estimate both the basic and effective reproduction numbers. Our results indicate that the early control measures implemented in Kuwait had the effect of delaying the intensity of the outbreak but were unsuccessful in reducing Rt below 1. This highlights a need for a systematic investigation of the current public health interventions as well as a scientific surveillance tool in developing countries that is sufficiently sensitive to outbreak temporal dynamics. Meanwhile, the developed model can serve as a public health tool to control the current outbreak. We enable the readers to replicate, adapt, consider alternative assumptions, and extend our model towards more complex generalizable scenarios in other countries.
Funding Statement: None.
Declaration of Interests: The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest.
Keywords: COVID-19, Mathematical Modeling, SARS-CoV-2, Public Health Intervention
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation