Adjusted dynamics of COVID-19 pandemic due to herd immunity in Bangladesh

  1. Md. Enamul Hoque
  2. Md. Shariful Islam
  3. Susanta Kumar Das
  4. Dipak Kumar Mitra
  5. Mohammad Ruhul Amin

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Abstract

Amid growing debate between scientists and policymakers on the trade-off between public safety and reviving economy during the COVID-19 pandemic, the government of Bangladesh decided to relax the countrywide lockdown restrictions from the beginning of June 2020. Instead, the Ministry of Public Affairs officials have declared some parts of the capital city and a few other districts as red zones or high-risk areas based on the number of people infected in the late June 2020. Nonetheless, the COVID-19 infection rate had been increasing in almost every other part of the country. Ironically, rather than ensuring rapid tests and isolation of COVID-19 patients, from the beginning of July 2020, the Directorate General of Health Services restrained the maximum number of tests per laboratory. Thus, the health experts have raised the question of whether the government is heading toward achieving herd immunity instead of containing the COVID-19 pandemic. In this paper, the dynamics of the pandemic due to SARS-CoV-2 in Bangladesh is analyzed with integrated the Unscented Kalman Filter (UKF) in the SIRD model. We demonstrate that the herd immunity threshold can be reduced to 31% than that of 60% by considering age group cluster analysis resulting in a total of 53.0 million susceptible populations. With the data of COVID-19 cases till January, 2021, the time-varying reproduction numbers are used to explain the nature of the pandemic. Based on the estimations of active, severe and critical cases, we discuss a set of policy recommendations to improve the current pandemic control methods in Bangladesh.

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  1. Version published to 10.1142/s0129183121501400
  2. ScreenIT

    SciScore for 10.1101/2020.09.03.20186957: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    Institutional Review Board Statementnot detected.
    Randomizationnot detected.
    Blindingnot detected.
    Power Analysisnot detected.
    Sex as a biological variablenot detected.

    Table 2: Resources

    No key resources detected.

    Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your code and data.

    Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:
    While designing the study and performing the experiment, we faced several challenges, such as, the limitation of enough COVID-19 tests restricted our understanding of actual scenario in the country, not having the information of COVID-19 test reports in a timely manner from every RT-PCR lab facilities for which making a reliable forecast became very difficult, and unavailability of the dataset in a standard format from the DGHS and IEDCR made our data analysis task very difficult. To explain the difficulties, we include a few examples in this manuscript. For instance, if a person from a family becomes COVID-19 positive, there is a high probability that the whole family might turn out to be positive. But, due to the limited number of test capacity, the infected number reported only for a single member from that family. Moreover, it has not been possible to track each deceased person who died with COVID-19 symptoms. Again, as the COVID-19 death reports does not mention the comorbidities, it is impossible to understand the actual cause of each fatality. In addition to these, the government considered a person as recovered if that person resulted in two consecutive negative COVID-19 tests. But due to negligence, a considerable amount of the COVID-19 patients did not take the second tests. This resulted inaccurate number of recovered cases, which the government later adjusted (Figure 4 and 5). Therefore, it has been very difficult to adjust the SIRD model parameters to represent t...

    Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.

    Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.

    Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.

    Results from rtransparent:
    • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • No protocol registration statement was detected.

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  3. Version published to 10.1101/2020.09.03.20186957v1 on medRxiv