Evaluation of the potential incidence of COVID-19 and effectiveness of contention measures in Spain: a data-driven approach

Alberto Aleta; Yamir Moreno

The first report by the Chinese authorities of the COVID-19 outbreak appeared in December 31st, 2019. Ever since then, the World Health Organization (WHO) and national public health authorities have been tracing and reporting on the evolution of the outbreak. As initially feared, and despite contention measures adopted in China, with a big city like Wuhan being quarantined for weeks, the disease spread beyond mainland China. As of February 29th, 2020, there are 85,403 cases worldwide, of which 79,394 correspond to China [1] . Additionally, 53 countries, including Spain, have reported at least one case of COVID-19. Two months into the outbreak, much is still unknown about the natural history of the disease and the pathogen. Important from the modeling perspective, for instance, it has been claimed that a large number of cases might have gone undetected by routinely screening passengers, due to the special characteristics of this disease [2] . Admmitedly, several studies predict that only between 10% and 20% of the cases have been detected and reported [3] [4] [5] [6] .