Evaluating new evidence in the early dynamics of the novel coronavirus COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, China with real time domestic traffic and potential asymptomatic transmissions

Can Zhou

is the (which was not peer-reviewed) The copyright holder for this preprint . and other limitations. It is thus important to consider alternative information to update our understanding about the outbreak. This study integrates the recent infection data on the early dynamics of the COVD-19 outbreak in Wuhan, China with updated real time domestic traffic data. Little empirical evidence was found supporting the presence of asymptomatic transmission. However, it is still too early to rule out its presence conclusively due to the relatively low sample size and the validity of the assumptions used in this study. The updated basic reproductive number was found to be 2.12 on average, which is significantly smaller than previous estimates (Read et al., 2020; Wu et al., 2020; Zhao et al., 2020) , probably because the new estimate factors in the social and non-pharmaceutical mitigation implemented in Wuhan through the evacuee dataset.