ABSTRACT
The outbreak of novel coronavirus disease of 2019 (COVID-19) has a wider geographical spread than other previous viruses such as Ebola and H1N1. This study aims to provide the estimates of the basic reproduction rate (R<sub>0</sub>) and case fatality rate (CFR), which applies to a generalized population. The systematic review helped to retrieve the published estimates of reproduction rate and case fatality rate in peer-reviewed articles from the PubMed MEDLINE database with defined inclusion and exclusion criteria in the period 15 December 2019 to 3 May 2020. A meta-analysis, with the inverse variance method, fixed- and random-effects model and the Forest plot, was performed to estimate the mean effect size or mean value of the basic reproduction rate and case fatality rate. We estimated the robust estimate of R<sub>0</sub> at 3.02 (2.42-3.68) persons and the robust estimate of CFR at 2.56 (2.06-3.05) percent after accounting for heterogeneity among studies using the random-effects model. We found that one person is likely to infect two to three persons in the absence of any control measures, and around three percent of the population are at the risk of death within one-and-a-half months from the onset of disease COVID-19 in a generalized population.