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

Lee, Hyunsun

The generation is determined by how closely a patient is linked to the index case, Patient 1. The index case is the only member of Gen 0 (Generation 0) in this outbreak. Gen 1 is a group of people who were directly infected from Patient 1, Gen 2 is infected from the members of Gen 1, and so on. The MERS outbreak in South Korea ended with four generations from Gen 0 to Gen 3 with a total of 186 MERS patients. The outbreak started in Seoul, South Korea, the shaded region in Fig. 2 , and spread out to the neighbor provinces. There were 17 hospitals where these 186 patients were confirmed with MERS. The hospitals are identified with the first letter of the province where each hospital is located and a number by random numbering within the province in Fig. 2 . Table 1 provides the hospital identification and its corresponding location in latitude and longitude for geographic information, and it will be used for spatio-temporal analysis later in this paper.