Maximum entropy method for estimating the reproduction number: An investigation for COVID-19 in China

Yong Tao

The copyright holder for this preprint . https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.03.14.20035659 doi: medRxiv preprint Before doing so, we first determine the starting point of each contagion period for COVID-19 in China. According to the report of China CDC [2] , January 8, 2020 was considered as the last day of a contagion period in Wuhan, China; therefore, we mark January 9, 2020 as the first day of the next contagion period. Based on this setting, the first period we report is from January 9, 2020 to January 22, 2020. In fact, this setting agrees with the date of locking down the Wuhan city, January 23, 2020. Here, we have collected the national-level data of the accumulative infected, recovered, and death cases of China's epidemic from January 10, 2020 to March 4, 2020, see Figure 2 . By using the data in Figure 2 , it is easy to calculate the number of real-time infected cases, ( ), in China for each day. This result has been shown in Figure 3 . Using the data in The results have been listed in Table 1 . The first period (from January 9, 2020 to January