Risk assessment of novel coronavirus COVID-19 outbreaks outside China

Peter Boldog; Tamas Tekeli; Zsolt Vizi; Attila Denes; Ferenc Bartha; Gergely Rost

The copyright holder for this preprint . https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.02.04.20020503 doi: medRxiv preprint We considered the group of countries from Asia which are the most connected to China: Thailand, Japan, Taiwan, and the Republic of Korea. They have similar baseline connectivity θ, and we focus on how travel restrictions and entry screenings can potentially reduce their risks, assuming different values of R loc in the case C = 150,000 (on the left of Figure 3 ) and C = 600,000 (on the right of Figure 3 ). For illustration purposes, we plotted Thailand (red) and the Republic of Korea (blue), but Taiwan and Japan are always between those two curves. We can see that, for example, on the right of Figure 3 for C = 600,000, unless R loc is very small, considerable reduction of the outbreak risk can be achieved only by extreme measures that prevent most importations. In Figure 4 , we assumed that European countries have very similar R loc and looked at their risks as a function of the number of cases. For illustration purposes, we selected countries which have relatively high (UK, Germany, France, Italy), medium (Belgium, Poland, Hungary), and low (Bulgaria, Croatia, Lithuania) connectivity to China. On the left, we assumed R loc = 1.4 and baseline θ, and with these parameters, outbreaks will likely occur in high risk countries as the case number approaches one million. By reducing R loc to 1.1 and by reducing θ to the half of its baseline (meaning that we assume . CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license It is made available under a is the author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.