• Research by Charles Sturt University mathematicians analysed transmission dynamics of the COVID-19 pandemic to better understand the disease’s spread
• The research explored potential prevention and control strategies to reduce COVID-19 spread in regional and metropolitan areas
• The same modelling framework can be used for data obtained in other locations around the world

A team of Charles Sturt University mathematics academics have conducted research into COVID-19 transmission and explored potential prevention and control strategies.

The research provides mathematical modelling and an optimal control strategy of COVID-19 in metropolitan and rural health districts of NSW for better pandemic management in Australia.

Research findings by Associate Professor in Mathematics and Statistics Azizur Rahman (pictured, inset) in the Charles Sturt School of Computing, Mathematics and Engineering and colleagues were recently published in their paper Modelling COVID-19 pandemic control strategies in metropolitan and rural health districts in New South Wales, Australia, in Scientific Reports (Springer, online).

Professor Rahman said COVID-19 is one of the most pressing public health problems in NSW and overall, the transmission dynamics and epidemiology of COVID-19 in NSW are not entirely understood.

“The NSW government initiated various intervention programs to eliminate COVID-19 last year, and although COVID-19 control in NSW has progressed remarkably, more effort is required,” Professor Rahman said.

He noted many gains, such as accurate contact tracing, availability of free diagnostic and treatment services, the participation of many partners such as community health care agencies and general practitioners, newer diagnostic services, sufficient human resources, sufficient capacity, for example, hospital admission capacity, and guidelines.

“To reduce the incidence of COVID-19 and prevent deaths from the virus in metropolitan and rural health districts of NSW, we need to identify the critical factors for developing COVID-19,” Professor Rahman said.

“We also need to improve preventative and management strategies, and treatment effectiveness, and reduce failure of treatment in infectious individuals.”

Previous studies show that a preventative strategy is best for the ‘single control strategy’ implementation to decrease COVID-19 cases and intervention costs.

In this study, the researchers presented a mathematical analysis of transmission dynamics of the COVID-19 outbreak to better understand how the disease spreads and explore potential prevention and control strategies capable of reducing the disease spread in rural and metropolitan areas, for better health management in NSW.

The researchers derived the ‘basic reproduction number’ and found that it plays an important role in the outbreak of COVID-19 in both rural and metropolitan districts. They also performed sensitivity analysis to identify the most important risk factors and found that ‘transmission rate’ had the largest influence on COVID-19 prevalence.

“Consistent with previous work, our findings also suggest that combining ‘control strategy’ with ‘health management strategy’, including enhanced services facilities and health management, is the most effective way to decrease the COVID-19 burden in metropolitan and rural districts in NSW,” Professor Rahman said.

“In our modelling, different control strategies, including ‘preventative control strategy’ and ‘management control strategy’, were implemented to measure their cost-effectiveness for improved and consistent health service facilities to the communities.

“Among the two single-controls, the ‘preventative control strategy’ is the most cost-effective.

“Therefore, when a single control strategy is used, our results suggest that the NSW government should improve the ‘preventative control strategy’ by reducing contact between infectious and susceptible individuals.

“Our principal finding is that the combination of preventative and management control strategies, such as the rapid provision of additional services, means it is the most impactful and cost-effectiveness strategy for reducing the spread of COVID-19 in NSW, Australia.”

Professor Rahman said the same modelling framework can be used for data obtained in other locations around the world.

This research was supported by Charles Sturt University COVID-19 Research Grant No. 57.