Estimation of the Time-Varying Reproduction Number of COVID-19 Outbreak in China

Chong You; Yuhao Deng; Wenjie Hu; Jiarui Sun; Qiushi Lin; Feng Zhou; Cheng Heng Pang; Yuan Zhang; Zhengchao Chen; Xiao-Hua Zhou

Hence, the corresponding serial intervals were approximated by the differences in dates of symptom onset rather than the actual dates of infection, see Figure 1 . We can see that some serial intervals are negative which is certainly impossible by definition. However, noting that the serial intervals were approximated from the dates of symptoms onset, this suggests that the negative values could be caused by different lengths of incubation period between individuals. Here a simple correction is implemented by resetting the negative values to zeros. This shifts the average of the serial intervals to 4.41 days and the standard deviation to 3.17 days after corrections, see table 1. Note that the serial interval of SARS-nCoV in Hongkong was 8.4 days on average. 3 In addition, a total of 67 cases in the collected data were able to identify the corresponding dates of infection. Figure 2 plots the histogram of infectious period while Table 2 shows the numerical summary. . CC-BY-NC-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.