The Novel Coronavirus, 2019-nCoV, is Highly Contagious and More Infectious Than Initially Estimated

Steven Sanche; Yen Ting Lin; Chonggang Xu; Ethan Romero-Severson; Nick Hengartner; Ruian Ke

The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not peer-reviewed) is the . https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.02.07.20021154 doi: medRxiv preprint in the duration of latent and infectious periods, we estimated the values of R0 to be 6.3 (CI: 3.3 to 11.3) and 4.7 (CI: 2.8 to 7.6), for the first and second scenarios, respectively (Fig. 3A) . When using the estimates from the 'case count' approach, we estimated slightly higher R0 values of 6.6 (CI: 4.0 to 10.5) and 4.9 (CI: 3.3 to 7.2), for the first and second scenarios, respectively (Fig. S5) . Overall, we report R0 values are likely be between 4.7 and 6.6 with a CI between 2.8 to 11.3. We argue that the high R0 and a relatively short incubation period lead to the extremely rapid growth of the of 2019-nCoV outbreak as compared to the 2003 SARS epidemic where R0 was estimated to be between 2.2 to 3.6 (15, 16) .