A pandemic risk assessment of middle east respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) in Saudi Arabia

Eifan, Saleh A.; Nour, Islam; Hanif, Atif; Zamzam, Abdelrahman M.M.; AlJohani, Sameera Mohammed

A sensitivity analysis was carried out to determine the impact of sporadic cases on the basic reproductive number in a specific cluster. Sensitivity analysis was performed by screening of the confirmed MERS-CoV cases that were found correlated to the index cases. Moreover, the sporadic cases were excluded in sensitivity analysis to estimate the impact of these cases on the spread pattern in the baseline scenario. The program code on the software R was adjusted by specifying the disease generation time. These adjustments allowed the computation of the basic reproductive number after a variation in the time of the initial emergence of the virus with transmission to humans (Poletto et al., 2014) . The R results of the sensitivity analysis were compared to their corresponding baseline R results for each cluster (Fig. 1) . In current sensitivity analysis, we referred to the total count of cases involved in the study from May 2013 to May 2015 as the baseline. On the other hand, the cases in the outbreak periods were referred as outbreak cases.