On a Statistical Transmission Model in Analysis of the Early Phase of COVID-19 Outbreak

Since December 2019, a disease caused by a novel strain of coronavirus (COVID-19) had infected many people and the cumulative confirmed cases have reached almost 180,000 as of 17, March 2020. The COVID-19 outbreak was believed to have emerged from a seafood market in Wuhan, a metropolis city of more than 11 million population in Hubei province, China. We introduced a statistical disease transmission model using case symptom onset data to estimate the transmissibility of the early-phase outbreak in China, and provided sensitivity analyses with various assumptions of disease natural history of the COVID-19. We fitted the transmission model to several publicly available sources of the outbreak data until 11, February 2020, and estimated lock down intervention efficacy of Wuhan city. The estimated R0 was between 2.7 and 4.2 from plausible distribution assumptions of the incubation period and relative infectivity over the infectious period. 95% confidence interval of R0 were also reported. Potential issues such as data quality concerns and comparison of different modelling approaches were discussed.

Automated summary

Since December 2019, a novel strain of coronavirus (COVID-19) has caused a disease outbreak in China, infecting a large number of people and spreading globally. A statistical disease transmission model was used to estimate the transmissibility of the early-phase outbreak, with sensitivity analyses and evaluation of lockdown intervention efficacy.