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

Two separate studies used the Susceptible-Exposed-Infected-Resistant (SEIR) model to study the epidemiological dynamics of the outbreak in Wuhan, and the estimated R 0 ranges from 2.68 to 3.8 (Read, Bridgen, Cummings, Ho, & Jewell, 2020; Wu, Leung, & Leung, 2020) . The estimate of R 0 shows much variation among different studies, and also within each study with different model assumptions. In addition, both studies used different traffic data to model the population flow: historical air travel was used in Read et al. (2020) , and historical air, train and road travel was used in Wu et al. (2020) . It is assumed that the real time traffic pattern in Wuhan is not affected by the outbreak.