Stochastic and spatio-temporal analysis of the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome outbreak in South Korea, 2015

Lee, Hyunsun

To calculate the reproductive rate for the MERS outbreak in South Korea, we use Equation (1) in a discrete form. The average number bðtÞ of new patients from an infectious patient per unit time (one day) and the survival function FðtÞ at time t are graphed in Fig. 8 . The calculated reproductive ratio based on these two functions is R ¼ 3:7949 which is considerably larger than 1 and this outbreak is classified as a major outbreak. For the probability of ultimate extinction that is the root of Equation (5), we define hðzÞ ¼ G 1 ðzÞ À z. The graph on the left in Fig. 9 shows hðzÞ and the probability of ultimate extinction for R > 1, i.e., the zero of the function hðzÞ less than 1, is located at z à ¼ 0:4996. The graph on the right shows the profile of the probability of ultimate extinction over the outbreak. The probability drops but immediately increases after the appearance of super-spreaders on Days 14e16, which indicates how important successful quarantine of super-spreaders is during an epidemic.