February 3, 2020

Reconciling early-outbreak preliminary estimates of the baseline reproductive number and its uncertainty: a new framework and applications to the novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) outbreak

Category: Article Summary

Topic: Transmission

• SW Park, et al. assess preliminary basic reproductive number (R0) estimates in several reported modeling approaches. They identify improved information on generation interval (time from when an individual is infected to when they infect another individual) as a key parameter to improve R0 estimates.
• The pooled estimate of R0 constructed using their defined approach is 3.1, with a 95% confidence interval of 2.1-5.7. This wide confidence interval likely reflect uncertainties in the currently available epidemic information.

Park SW, et al. (Feb 2, 2020). Reconciling early-outbreak preliminary estimates of the baseline reproductive number and its uncertainty: a new framework and applications to the novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) outbreak. Pre-Print. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.01.30.20019877v2