COVID-19 Outbreak in Oman: Model-Driven Impact Analysis and Challenges

Kashif Zia; Umar Farooq

What can be worse than a complete inaction by the authorities? The default values assigned to the variables: beta = bbeta = 0.5, abeta = 1, and alpha = 0.001, were able to generate such a situation. In this case, abeta×beta = 1.0×0.5 (infectious rate incurred by infected individuals with symptoms) and bbeta = 0.5 (infectious rate incurred by infected individuals with no symptoms) both are 0.5, depicting the basic setting with no differentiation. The fact that the rate of getting isolated in really low (alpha = 0.001), depicts that there is no effort yet put by the authorities to contain the epidemic. In the context of Oman, we have put a few cases in Muscat, Khasab, and Salalah as the starting cases which got symptoms, and ran the simulation for a year, starting from February, 26, 2020 (when a few such cases were reported). Even though the infection rate This is case 1 shown in Figure 2 . It suggests that the outbreak would be rapid and extreme, reaching 0.2 million cases per day after 45 days of the outbreak, 6 . CC-BY 4.0 International license It is made available under a author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.