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

Lee, Hyunsun

The basic reproductive ratio is the expected number of secondary infections arising from an infectious individual over the entire epidemic. Since the estimation of the reproductive ratio is based on sufficient data acquired from the fully-completed or well established epidemic, the prediction of further development of the epidemic is somewhat limited (Mills et al., 2004) . Though there are different approaches for estimating the reproductive ratio (Hefferman, Smith, & Wahl, 2005) , we chose to use the survival function method that is widely applicable as there is no assumption of a constant transmission rate. To calculate the reproductive ratio, the average contact rate bðtÞ as a function of t is directly simulated from the data instead of using a constant rate in other works (Chang, 2017; Choi, Jung, Choi, Hur, & Ki, 2018) , and the survival function is also examined from the outbreak data. The resulting reproductive ratio for the MERS outbreak in South Korea is R ¼ 3:7949, and the MERS outbreak in South Korea is classified as a major outbreak.