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

Julien Riou; Christian L. Althaus

Simulations were initialized with one index case. For each primary case, we generated secondary cases according to a negative-binomial offspring distribution with mean R 0 and dispersion k [4, 5] . The dispersion parameter k can be interpreted as a measure of the probability of superspreading events (the lower the value of k, the higher the probability of superspreading). The generation time interval D was assumed to be gamma-distributed with a shape parameter of 2, and a mean that varied between 7 and 14 days. We explored a wide range of parameter combinations (Table 1 ) and ran 1,000 stochastic simulations for each individual combination. This corresponds to a total of 3.52 million one-index-case simulations that were run on UBELIX (http://www.id.unibe.ch/hpc), the high performance computing cluster at the University of Bern.