  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. 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. 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 (ICUs). 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.
  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.
