Preparedness and vulnerability of African countries against introductions of 2019-nCoV

Marius Gilbert; Giulia Pullano; Francesco Pinotti; Eugenio Valdano; Chiara Poletto; Pierre-Yves Boelle; Eric D'Ortenzio; Yazdan Yazdanpanah; Serge Paul Eholie; Mathias Altmann; Bernardo Gutierrez; Moritz U. G. Kraemer; Vittoria Colizza

The 2018 SPAR database [16] (1) and Radiation emergency (1) . From them, we derived two aggregated indicators that would be relevant to quantify the countries capacity to deal with the introduction and spread of 2019-nCoV. The first quantifies the overall capacity of a country to deal with an emergency linked to a directly transmitted infectious disease, from early detection to the overall handling of a potential epidemic, and was estimated as an average between all indicators, except those of the groups Zoonoses, Food safety, Chemical events, Radiation emergency. The second was more focused on early detection, and averaged the scores of the groups Laboratory, Surveillance, Points of Entry. A very high correlation between the two metrics was found (All countries: r = 0.929, n = 182, p < 0.001; Africa : r = 0.893, n = 52, p < 0.001), so we considered only the first metric that we call SPAR indicator in the following analyses.