Estimation of the epidemic properties of the 2019 novel coronavirus: A mathematical modeling study

Jinghua Li; Yijing Wang; Stuart Gilmour; Mengying Wang; Daisuke Yoneoka; Ying Wang; Xinyi You; Jing Gu; Chun Hao; Liping Peng; Zhicheng Du; Dong Roman Xu; Yuantao Hao

Because some of these methods are driven by a Suceptible-Infectious-Recovered (SIR) model, but an asymptomatic latent phase had been identified in the early progress of the disease, we also estimated the basic reproduction number using a standard Susceptible-Exposed-Infectious-Recovered (SEIR) model. An analytic expression for the basic reproduction number was obtained from the model using next generation matrices, 19 and predictions of cumulative cases were fitted to the data on national cases using maximum likelihood estimation to identify the optimal value of " . 20 A Metropolis-Hastings Monte Carlo sampling method 21 was used to estimate a credible interval for the basic reproduction number. In this model the latent phase was fixed to last 5.2 days, 8 and the recovery period was fixed at 7 days. Although the biological recovery period of the disease has not been clearly established, the period from onset of symptoms to isolation in specialist hospitals was assumed to be 7 days, and the recovery compartment of the SEIR model acts as a proxy for isolation in these models. All MH estimates used 20,000 Monte Carlo Iterations with a burn-in period of 5,000 iterations and a normally distributed proposal distribution.