Epidemiological characteristics of 1212 COVID-19 patients in Henan, China

Pei Wang; Junan Lu; Yanyu Jin; Mengfan Zhu; Lingling Wang; Shunjie Chen

is the (which was not peer-reviewed) The copyright holder for this preprint . https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.02. 21.20026112 doi: medRxiv preprint to fall after that day. Among the 18 regions of Henan, Xinyang is with the heaviest epidemic, and it is currently also with the highest daily increment. We found that 55% patients in Henan were male, which is apparently higher than the females. We found that the gender difference of patients in Henan is 1.2226 : 1, while from Yang et al. [4] , they reported that the gender difference for 4021 patients from over 30 provinces is 0.31 : 0.27 = 1.1481 : 1. Our result is close to the existing ones. We reported that the MFRs of the whole province and its 18 regions are not the main factor that results to the gender difference in patients. Two possible main factors that result to such gender difference of patients include 1) the expression and distribution of ACE2s were wider in male patients than those in females, and 2) males are more active and with wider social activities than females in many regions of Henan. The ages of patients generally follow normal distribution, and with more than 81% patients are aged between 21 and 60 years old. N a n y a n g C e n tr a l H o s p . Incubation period is very important but very difficult to be estimated, since it is difficult to know when the patients were infected. We define the period from firstly contacting with suspicious persons or recently return from Wuhan to firstly appearing clinical symptoms (fever, cough etc) as incubation period, and we estimate its distribution. Statistical analysis on 483 patients reveals that the average estimated incubation period was 7.4 days, the mode was 4 days. About 55% patients were with incubation periods lower than 7 days, while more than 92% patients were lower than 14 days. About 7.45% patients were overestimated with more than 14 days incubation periods. Based on ME, OLS and MLE approaches, we modeled the incubation period as logarithmic normal distributions, and we found the ME method can well mimic the long right tails of the PDF for the incubation periods. Based on the ME approach, interquartile range of theoretically estimated incubation period is between 4.1 and 9.4 days. It is noted that, due to . CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license It is made available under a author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.