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

Lee, Hyunsun

While the reproductive ratio and the probability of ultimate extinction are useful to classify the outbreak and predict the extinction of the disease in a long term, it fails to provide any spatial or spatio-temporal aspects of the transmission. The spatial and temporal proximity of the transmission between occurrences is measured based on the autocorrelation function that describes how likely the spatial and temporal differences between patients vary together. The autocorrelation profiles the entire transmission period, as well as over each generation period, and provides good insight in understanding and characterizing the patterns of inter-hospital or intra-hospital transmission of the MERS outbreak in South Korea. We observed a few distinct peaks of autocorrelation values in the spatial and temporal domain, clearly displaying the characteristics of the MERS outbreak in South Korea.