Pattern of early human-to-human transmission of Wuhan 2019-nCoV

Julien Riou; Christian L. Althaus

In order to reach between 1,000 and 9,700 infected cases by January 18, 2020, the early human-to-human transmission of 2019-nCoV are characterized by values of R 0 around around 2.2 (90% high density interval 1.4-3.8) (figure 1). The observed data at this point is compatible with a large range of values for the dispersion parameter k (median 0.54, 90% several cities including Wuhan shows that Chinese authorities are aware of the potential magnitude of this outbreak. Second, the risk of superspreading events could be similar to SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV, but is unlikely to be higher. This has important implications for international travel, as superspreading increases the risk of large infection clusters in distant countries originating from one or a few unidentified imported cases. The implementation of control measures in hospital settings, especially emergency rooms, will also be of prime importance, as has been shown by the examples of MERS-CoV in South Korea [15] and in Saudi Arabia [16] . Third, our simulations are also consistent with lower levels of superspreading that are more similar to 1918 pandemic influenza. In this case, we would expect less explosive outbreaks resulting from single cases but a higher risk of sustained transmission chains [4] .