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is the (which was not peer-reviewed) The copyright holder for this preprint . https://doi.org/10. 1101 where S(t), E(t), I(t), R(t) were the number of susceptible, latent, infected and removed individuals in the population at time t, respectively, N(t) is the total number of individuals in the population, R 0 is the basic reproductive number, L ij (t) is the daily number of individuals migrating from i to j, for i, j ∈{w: Wuhan, i: international, c: other cities of China}, and z(t) is the daily force of zoonotic infection. It is assumed that the dynamics start on Dec. 1, 2019 (day 0) with a population of c. 14 million susceptible individuals, initiated with a constant zoonotic infection equivalent to 43x2 infectious individuals until Jan. 1, 2020 (day 31) when the Huanan seafood market was disinfected. In this study, we only model the disease dynamics in the city of Wuhan, which has 9.08 million permanent (2020). In the baseline model, only one parameter was estimated, i.e., R 0 , and it was given a non-informative prior R 0~U niform(0, 10).