Risk assessment of novel coronavirus COVID-19 outbreaks outside China

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

Cumulative cases and connectivity can be estimated, in general. However, to make a good assessment of the outbreak risk, it is very important to estimate R loc in each country. In the absence of available transmission data, one may rely on the experiences from previous outbreaks, such as the detailed description in [35] of the reductions in the effective reproduction numbers for SARS due to various control measures. In this study, we used a range of R loc values between the critical value 1 and the baseline R 0 = 2.6. A further source of uncertainty is in the distribution of the generation time interval, since a different distribution gives a different outbreak risk even with the same R loc . For our calculations, we used the distribution from [19] (see also [20] ); a more in-depth discussion of this topic may be found in [36] . Knowing R loc and the generation interval are needed not only to have a better quantitative risk estimation, but also for guidance as to which types of control measures may reduce the outbreak risk the most effectively.