Expected impact of COVID-19 outbreak in a major metropolitan area in Brazil

Tarcisio M Rocha Filho; Fabiana S. Ganem dos Santos; Victor B Gomes; Thiago A.H. Rocha; Julio H.R. Croda; Walter M Ramalho; Wildo N Araujo

The determination of the value of R 0 is affected by the supposition that both the time from 159 the start of symptoms, and confirmation, and sub-notification proportions, are roughly constant 160 during the outbreak, resulting in a possible overestimation during the initial stage of the epidemic. 161 The raise in the number of confirmed cases may be in great part be due to a better sensitivity of 162 the health system surveillance and a decrease of the time lag for laboratory confirmation. In this section we summarize limitations of our work. We assumed that different age-group have 165 the same transmission probability per physical contact, although no information is available to 166 avoid this assumption. We also considered that that every severe or critic case will be in need for 167 hospitalization and supposed, again due to a lack of more detailed data, that the probability of an 168 infected individual from a given age group is proportional to the reported values of the death rate 169 March 14, 2020 7/11 . CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license It is made available under a author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.