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

ABSTRACT

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 $$R_0$$ 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 $$R_0$$ were also reported. Potential issues such as data quality concerns and comparison of different modelling approaches were discussed.