The time scale of asymptomatic transmission affects estimates of epidemic potential in the COVID-19 outbreak

Sang Woo Park; Daniel M Cornforth; Jonathan Dushoff; Joshua S Weitz

To estimate the effects of assumptions about asymptomatic transmission on the inferred importance of asymptomatic transmission and estimates of the basic reproduction number R 0 , we parameterize the generation interval distributions of asymptomatic and symptomatic cases based on their means,Ḡa andḠs , and dispersions, κ a and κ s . We assume that generation intervals are gamma distributed, and we set the dispersion to be equal to the squared coefficient of variation (the reciprocal of the gamma shape parameter, see Supplementary Materials). We assume that epidemic growth rate r and the generation-interval distribution of symptomatic case are known, using parameter values that are consistent with earlier COVID-19 models [16] : 1/r = 7 days,Ḡs = 8 days, and κ s = 0.5. We infer values of q using . CC-BY-ND 4.0 International license It is made available under a author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.