Feasibility of controlling 2019-nCoV outbreaks by isolation of cases and contacts

Joel Hellewell; Sam Abbott; Amy Gimma; Nikos I Bosse; Christopher I Jarvis; Timothy W Russell; James D Munday; Adam J Kucharski; W John Edmunds; CMMID nCoV working group; Sebastian Funk; Rosalind M Eggo

The copyright holder for this preprint . https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.02.08.20021162 doi: medRxiv preprint The incubation period for each case was drawn from a Weibull distribution. A corresponding serial interval for each case was then drawn from a skewed normal distribution with the mean parameter of the distribution set to the incubation period for that case, a standard deviation of 2, and a skew parameter chosen such that a set proportion of serial intervals were shorter than the incubation period (meaning that a set proportion of transmission happened before symptom onset) ( Figure 2 ). This sampling approach ensured that the serial interval and incubation period for each case was correlated, and prevents biologically implausible scenarios where a case can develop symptoms very soon after exposure but not become infectious until very late after exposure and vice versa.