An updated estimation of the risk of transmission of the novel coronavirus (2019-nCov)

By B. Tang, N. Bragazzi, Qian Li, Sanyi Tang, Yanni Xiao, Jianhong Wu. Infectious Disease Modelling, 2020

734 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The basic reproduction number of an infectious agent is the average number of infections one case can generate over the course of the infectious period, in a naïve, uninfected population. It is well-known that the estimation of this number may vary due to several methodological issues, including different assumptions and choice of parameters, utilized models, used datasets and estimation period. With the spreading of the novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) infection, the reproduction number has been found to vary, reflecting the dynamics of transmission of the coronavirus outbreak as well as the case reporting rate. Due to significant variations in the control strategies, which have been changing over time, and thanks to the introduction of detection technologies that have been rapidly improved, enabling to shorten the time from infection/symptoms onset to diagnosis, leading to faster confirmation of the new coronavirus cases, our previous estimations on the transmission risk of the 2019-nCoV need to be revised. By using time-dependent contact and diagnose rates, we refit our previously proposed dynamics transmission model to the data available until January 29th, 2020 and re-estimated the effective daily reproduction ratio that better quantifies the evolution of the interventions. We estimated when the effective daily reproduction ratio has fallen below 1 and when the epidemics will peak. Our updated findings suggest that the best measure is persistent and strict self-isolation. The epidemics will continue to grow, and can peak soon with the peak time depending highly on the public health interventions practically implemented.

Subfields: Genetics, Infectious Diseases, Modeling and Simulation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c2cd248811b0d9bdcfeb250e86518d19e3b08239

Citations in the corpus

• Research and Development on Therapeutic Agents and Vaccines for COVID-19 and Related Human Coronavirus Diseases (2020, neutral): “8 The prospect also exists for discovery of therapeutic agents targeting the highly conserved proteins associated with both SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2.”
• The psychological impact of the COVID-19 epidemic on college students in China (2020, neutral): “In China, the government took measures, including travel warnings and bans, and extending the national holidays to control the outbreak, which inevitably disrupted routine life (Tang et al., 2020) and resulted in anxiety.”
• Spread and dynamics of the COVID-19 epidemic in Italy: Effects of emergency containment measures (2020, neutral): “This is true, in particular, for the critical compartments of asymptomatic (5, 6, 9, 28) and of presymptom infectious individuals (see below).”
• To mask or not to mask: Modeling the potential for face mask use by the general public to curtail the COVID-19 pandemic (2020, neutral): “These include a relatively simple modification of an SIR-type model by Brienen et al. (2010), while Tracht et al. (2010) considered a more complex SEIR model that explicitly disaggregated those that do and do not use masks.”