The spatio-temporal epidemic dynamics of COVID-19 outbreak in Africa.

Corona virus disease 2019 (COVID-19), caused by the novel severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), was first detected in the city of Wuhan, China in December 2019. Although, the disease appeared in Africa later than other regions, it has now spread to virtually all countries on the continent. We provide early spatio-temporal dynamics of COVID-19 within the first 62 days of the disease's appearance on the African continent. We used a two-parameter hurdle Poisson model to simultaneously analyse the zero counts and the frequency of occurrence. We investigate the effects of important healthcare capacities including hospital beds and number of medical doctors in different countries. The results show that cases of the pandemic vary geographically across Africa with notably high incidence in neighbouring countries particularly in West and North Africa. The burden of the disease (per 100 000) mostly impacted Djibouti, Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria. Temporally, during the first 4 weeks, the burden was highest in Senegal, Egypt and Mauritania, but by mid-April it shifted to Somalia, Chad, Guinea, Tanzania, Gabon, Sudan and Zimbabwe. Currently, Namibia, Angola, South Sudan, Burundi and Uganda have the least burden. These findings could be useful in guiding epidemiological interventions and the allocation of scarce resources based on heterogeneity of the disease patterns.

Estimating lifetime malnourished period and its statistics based on the concept of Markov chain with reward.

Malnutrition among women, accessed through body mass index, has great consequences for achieving key national targets. This study introduces the concept of lifetime malnourished period (LMP): the number of years a woman would remain malnourished, either as underweight or overweight given that she is currently malnourished, and its measures of variation. Markov chain with rewards was used to compute the moments of LMP based on age-specific mortality rates and proportion of women of reproductive age that were either underweight or overweight using data from the 2013 Nigeria Demographic and Health Survey. Each of the two malnutrition status was treated as a Bernoulli-distributed reward with probability taken as the proportion of overweight or underweight women at specific age. Findings indicate that the average LMP for an underweight woman in Nigeria at age 15 years is 2.3 years but 5.8 for overweight. The remaining LMP for underweight is lower among women who attain higher level of education than for those with no or primary level of education with standard deviation reducing with age. Further, we found overweight women from the richest households and those from urban areas to have longer years of remaining in that state of health than their other counterparts, and that longevity contributes more to the variance in LMP for overweight than for underweight women.