The coronavirus disease 2019 ( COVID -19) pandemic reached Kenya in March 2020 with the initial cases reported in the capital city Nairobi and in the coastal area Mombasa. As reported by the World Health Organization, the outbreak of COVID -19 has spread across the world, killed many, collapsed economies and changed the way people live since it was first reported in Wuhan, China, in the end of 2019. As of May 25,2020 It had led to over 100,000 confirmed cases in Africa with over 3000 deaths. The trend poses a huge threat to global public health. Understanding the early transmission dynamics of the infection and evaluating the effectiveness of control measures is crucial for assessing the potential for sustained transmission to occur in new areas.
We employed a SEIHCRD mathematical transmission model with reported Kenyan data on cases of COVID -19 to estimate how transmission varies over time. The model is concise in structure, and successfully captures the course of the COVID -19 outbreak, and thus sheds light on understanding the trends of the outbreak. The next generation matrix approach was adopted to calculate the basic reproduction number ( $R_0$ ) from the model to assess the factors driving the infection . The results from the model analysis shows that non-pharmaceutical interventions over a relatively long period is needed to effectively get rid of the COVID -19 epidemic otherwise the rate of infection will continue to increase despite the increased rate of recovery.