A Heuristic Model for Spreading of COVID 19 in Singapore

Fook Hou Lee

The copyright holder for this preprint . https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04.15.20067264 doi: medRxiv preprint 1 National University of Singapore (non-medical researcher)  The rate of contacts in the community. This depends upon the social setting, proximity between people and whether they are using protective equipment and practising good personal hygiene etc. For instance, Zhang et al. (2020) , using early stage data from the Diamond Princess cruise ship, estimated the R0 to range from 2.06-2.52, with a median at 2.28. also estimated a similar range for R0, from 2.2 to 2.7. Leung et al. (2020) also estimated an R0 = 2.68. On the other hand, Sanche et al. (2020) estimated a much higher R0 ranging from 4.7 to 6.6. These differences may be attributed to different social settings and data accuracy. There may also be issues relating to undetected cases which may impact the estimated R0. Niehus et al. (2020) , for instance, postulated that "…the global ability to detect imported cases is 38% (95% HPDI 22% -64%) of Singapore's capacity".