Is Kenya Flattening the COVID-19 Curve? Insights from Mathematical Modelling

“Dividing an elephant in half does not produce two small elephants”. Despite the apparent flattening of some countries’ COVID-19 curves, deeper insights from mathematical modelling tell a different story of manifest outcomes that could be traced to the underlying wide regional differentials in population-normalised COVID-19 testing rates.

Video link: https://twitter.com/citizentvkenya/status/1354495690139963392?s=09

Global Overview

As of January 19, 2021, there were more than 96.6 million confirmed COVID-19 cases globally, more than 3.3 million or 3% of those cases in Africa. The recent global case fatality rate has been more or less constant at 2.1% with a recovery rate of 72%. These figures are a noticeable contrast from Africa’s average case fatality rate of 2.4% and recovery rate of 83%. For a continent with 17% of the global population, these statistics apparently tell of a region that has been disproportionately spared the worst scenarios. Deeper insights from mathematical modelling, however, tell a different story of manifest outcomes that could be traced to the underlying wide regional differentials in population-normalised COVID-19 testing rates. Kenya qualifies as Africa’s suitable representative for testing this hypothesis.

Systems Thinking Gaps

The traditional reductionist and linear thinking approach to solving complex problems is obsessed with the…