Tracking and forecasting milepost moments of the epidemic in the early-outbreak: framework and applications to the COVID-19

Huiwen Wang; Yanwen Zhang; Shan Lu; Shanshan Wang

There have been various literatures on COVID-19 from different aspects, i.e., the origin of COVID-19, the clinical features as well as epidemic transmission characteristics. Specifically, for the origin of the virus, (Fan et al., 2019) and (Luk et al., 2019) pointed out that COVID-19 is an infectious disease caused by a virus closely related to SARS-CoV-2, while others believed that the COVID-19 virus was originally derived from wild animals (Huang et al., 2020; Benvenuto et al., 2020) . For the epidemic transmission characteristics, Holshue et al. (2020) and Hui et al. (2020) found that the virus can be transmitted from person to person and that it has a high interpersonal transmission rate. investigated the preliminary estimation of the basic reproduction number R 0 , which ranges 2.24(95%CI : 1.96 − 2.55) to 3.58(95%CI : 2.89 − 4.39) in the early outbreak, while Prasse et al. (2020) estimated it around 2.2, Tang et al. (2020) applied likelihood-based and model-based methods to the analysis of early reported cases, and the results showed that R 0 is as high as 6.47. used the SEIR model and stated that the range of R 0 of COVID-19 is 2.8-3.3, indicating that the early pathogenic transmission capacity of COVID-19 is close to or slightly higher than SARS. Other literatures related R 0 are Anastassopoulou et al. (2020) ; and reference therein.