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

is the (which was not peer-reviewed) The copyright holder for this preprint . https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.02.05.20020792 doi: medRxiv preprint Here we show that the risk of introduction to African countries is highly heterogeneous, with Egypt, Algeria, South Africa, Ethiopia and Nigeria estimated to be at highest risk. We also identified that part of this heterogeneity in Africa depended on the distribution of cases within Algeria, Ethiopia, South Africa, Nigeria were part of the 13 top priority countries identified by WHO, based on their direct links and volume of travel to China [4] . Egypt, which was estimated here to be at highest risk, was not part of that list, although Cairo was identified as the African airport with the highest passenger volume from the affected areas [9] . Few other discrepancies were observed (Morocco and Angola were estimated to be at moderate risk but did not appear . CC-BY-ND 4.0 International license It is made available under a author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.