Estimating the Basic Reproductive Number of COVID-19 Cases in Ghana

Abstract

A disease can be defined as an adverse change from a normally functional state of the living body usually characterized with or accompanied with some signs and symptoms which is differing in nature from physical injury. A pandemic is the worldwide spread of a new disease. COVID-19 is one of the global pandemic that emerged in Wuhan, China, in December 2019 and has since then spread over through the world. In Ghana, the first case of COVID-19 was reported in March 14, 2020 and has increased from just one case to over 29000 cases with over 150 deaths as at July 23, 2020. This study focuses on the estimation of the basic reproductive number, R0 using the Next Generation Method (NGM) approach. COVID-19 data in Ghana was collected and parameters were estimated using the Least-Squares Method. The basic reproductive number of Ghana is estimated to be 2.52 whilst the R0 ranges between 1.47 − 2.65 for transmission rates of 0.5 − 0.9.