Abstract
The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) that was first reported at the end of 2019 has impacted almost every aspect of life as we know it. This paper focuses on the incidence of the disease in Italy and Spain—two of the first and most affected European countries. Using two simple mathematical epidemiological models—the Susceptible-Infectious-Recovered model and the log-linear regression model, we model the daily and cumulative incidence of COVID-19 in the two countries during the early stage of the outbreak, and compute estimates for basic measures of the infectiousness of the disease including the basic reproduction number, growth rate, and doubling time. Estimates of the basic reproduction number were found to be larger than 1 in both countries, with values being between 2 and 3 for Italy, and 2.5 and 4 for Spain. Estimates were also computed for the more dynamic effective reproduction number, which showed that since the first cases were confirmed in the respective countries the severity has generally been decreasing. The predictive ability of the log-linear regression model was found to give a better fit and simple estimates of the daily incidence for both countries were computed.
Highlights
The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) was widely reported to have first been detected in Wuhan (Hebei province, China) in December 2019
For both Italy and Spain, we set up and solve the minimisation problem for the SIR model described in Section for region-level and national-level COVID-19 incidence for the first 14 days after the first cases were confirmed in each respective country and region
The mean estimates are computed from 10,000 samples of R0 values generated from the log-linear regression of the incidence data in the growth phase, and the distributions of these samples are plotted in S1 Fig. Compared with the estimates from the SIR model, we find that in all but the case of Italy, the estimates of R0 from the log-linear model are greater than that from the SIR model—in these cases, the lowest estimates of R0 from the log-linear models are larger by between 0.5 to 1
Summary
The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) was widely reported to have first been detected in Wuhan (Hebei province, China) in December 2019. COVID-19 continued to spread to all provinces in China and very quickly spread to other countries within and outside of Asia. Over 45 million cases of infected individuals have been confirmed in over 180 countries with in excess of 1 million deaths [1]. Since the first confirmed cases were reported in China, much of the literature has focused on the outbreak in China including the transmission of the disease, the risk factors of infection, and the biological properties of the virus—see for example key literature such as [2,3,4,5,6]. More recent literature has started to cover an increasing number of regions outside of China
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