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The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not peer-reviewed) is the .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 represented the trajectory of infected individuals who travelled from Wuhan using a stochastic agent-based model. The transitions of the infected individuals from symptom onset to hospitalization and then to case confirmation were assumed to follow the distributions inferred from the case report data (see Supplementary Materials for detail). Simulation of the model using best fit parameters showed that the model described the observed case counts over time well (Fig. 2E) . The estimated date of exponential growth initiation is December 16, 2019 (CI: December 12 to Dec 21) and the exponential growth rate is 0.30 per day (CI: 0.26 to 0.34 per day). These estimates are consistent with estimates in the 'first arrival' approach ( Fig. 2F and G, and Fig. S4 ).