The Characteristics of Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus Transmission Dynamics in South Korea

Kim, Yunhwan; Lee, Sunmi; Chu, Chaeshin; Choe, Seoyun; Hong, Saeme; Shin, Youngseo

Since South Korea is where the largest number of cases was reported outside the Middle East, we need to pay more attention to the South Korean case. While a few researches have dealt with the South Korean case, as briefly mentioned above, research gaps still exist that need to be filled. First of all, whether some demographic characteristics, such as age or sex, and locations have influence on the possibility of being infected needs to be explored. Also, the transmissibility needs to be investigated with more detail. As done in some literature, transmissibility in hospitals and in general need to be calculated separately and it needs to be taken into consideration whether the transmissibility might change in time. Here, the SIR-type mathematical modeling is of great use, while there are very few in MERS-CoV studies. Its usefulness might be boosted if combined with real-world data, which will be done in the present study.