Early dynamics of transmission and control of COVID-19: a mathematical modelling study

Adam J Kucharski; Timothy W Russell; Charlie Diamond; Yang Liu; John Edmunds; Sebastian Funk; Rosalind M Eggo

To estimate the early dynamics of transmission in Wuhan, we fitted a stochastic transmission dynamic model (17) to multiple publicly available datasets on cases in Wuhan and internationally exported cases from Wuhan. The four datasets we fitted to were: daily number of new internationally exported cases (or lack thereof), by date of onset, as of 26th January 2020; daily number of new cases in Wuhan with no market exposure, by date of onset, between 1st December 2019 and 1st January 2020; daily number of new cases in China, by date of onset, between 29th December 2019 and 23 rd January 2020; proportion of infected passengers on evacuation flights between 29 th January and 4 th February 2020. We used an additional two datasets for comparison with model outputs: daily number of new exported cases from Wuhan (or lack thereof) in countries with high connectivity to Wuhan (i.e. top 20 most at risk), by date of confirmation, as of 10th February 2020; data on new confirmed cases reported in Wuhan between 16 th January and 11 th February 2020 (full details in the Appendix).