COVID-19 Disease Mapping in Malaysia Using Poisson-gamma Model to Safeguard Community

Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is an extremely transmissible disease that causes tremendous human suffering worldwide, with millions of people dying within two years. In Malaysia, the COVID-19 pandemic continues with an increasing number of positive cases. In order to monitor and prevent the disease, disease mapping is proposed for quantifying and describing the disease risk. The primary objective of this research is to estimate the COVID-19 relative risk using one of the most widely employed Bayesian approaches, namely the Poisson-gamma model, and eventually display a disease map to show the COVID-19 risk level in each state. The relative risk results are divided into five different levels to classify the COVID-19 risk level in each Malaysian state. The illustration of five different shades in the disease mapping has distinguished the risk levels within each state, where the most light-coloured area indicates very low risk whilst the most dark-coloured area indicates very high risk. According to the results, the area with the lowest risk of contracting COVID-19 in 2020 is Perlis, and the area with the highest risk is Labuan, whereas in 2021, Perlis remains the lowest risk area while Selangor is the highest risk area.