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Abstract

Background: COVID-19 has spread from China across Europe and the
United States and has become a global pandemic. In countries of the
Global South, due to often weaker socioeconomic options and health
care systems, effective local countermeasures remain debated.
Methods: We combine large-scale socioeconomic and traffic survey
data with detailed agent-based simulations of local transportation to
analyze COVID-19 spreading in a regional model for the Nelson
Mandela Bay Municipality in South Africa under a range of
countermeasure scenarios.
Results: The simulations indicate that any realistic containment
strategy, including those similar to the one ongoing in South Africa,
may yield a manifold overload of available intensive care units. Only
immediate and the most severe countermeasures, up to a complete
lock-down that essentially inhibits all joint human activities, can
contain the epidemic effectively.
Conclusions: As South Africa exhibits rather favorable conditions
compared to many other countries of the Global South, our findings
constitute rough conservative estimates and may support identifying
strategies towards containing COVID-19 as well as any major future
pandemics in these countries.