COVID-19 pandemic in the African continent: forecasts of cumulative cases, new infections, and mortality

Yohannes Kinfu; Uzma Alam; Tom Achoki

is a geometric-mean of the socio-demographic index (S) and the health access and quality index (Q) relative to that of country k. The relevant data for each country was sourced from IHME. (21) (22) Analysis was performed using STATA version 16.0 .(33) Figure A1 in the Appendix shows a graphical comparison of observed and predicted confirmed COVID-19 cases (on the log scale). The statistical diagnostic tests as well the patterns from the graphical analysis suggest that the predicative model sufficiently captures the observed data. As can be seen from the table, not only are the RMSE, the MAE and the Pseudo-R 2 consistent across samples, the error margins are also small. Hence, we have used the resulting model to forecast cumulative COVID-19 cases, estimate new infections and deaths from COVID-19 for each of the 47 African countries which have reported at least one case as of March 31, 2020. Table 1 presents cumulative COVID-19 cases and prevalence rates for Africa and its five sub-regions for the period April 1 to June 30 2020. By the end of April cumulated infection across the region will reach 2.5 million cases and will further increase to 16.2 million by June 30. During the same period, cumulative cases in the hardest hit sub-region in the African continent, Northern Africa, is predicted to increase from 1.3 million at the end of April to over 7.5 million by June 30. This is followed by Southern, Western, and Central Africa sub-regions. Throughout the forecast period, Eastern Africa is predicted to experience the lowest case load and prevalence rate in the continent throughout the forecast period. Note these estimates are highly uncertain; the 95% confidence intervals (CI) are shown in Table 1 below. Figure 1A shows spatial patterns of cumulative COVID-19 cases by June 30, 2020 for the African continent. In Northern Africa, the leading contributor to the burden of COVID-19 is Morocco. By the end of June, Morocco will have 4.5 million cumulative COVID-19 cases, and this is almost double the estimated number for Algeria, a country with the next highest burden, 2.8 by the end of June. In Southern Africa, South Africa and Swaziland are on the lead. By the end of June, these two countries are expected to have respectively around 2.6 million and 250 thousand cumulative COVID-19 cases. In the Western Africa sub-region, cumulative cases will be dominated by Cote d'Ivoire and Ghana, despite Nigeria having a larger population than both countries combined.