Abstract

BackgroundAs a new emerging infectious disease pandemic, there is an urgent need to understand the dynamics of COVID-19 in each country to inform planning of emergency measures to contain its spread. It is essential that appropriate disease control activities are planned and implemented in a timely manner. Thailand was one of the first countries outside China to be affected with subsequent importation and domestic spread in most provinces in the country.MethodA key ingredient to guide planning and implementation of public health measures is a metric of transmissibility which represents the infectiousness of a disease. Ongoing policies can utilize this information to plan appropriately with updated estimates of disease transmissibility. Therefore we present descriptive analyses and preliminary statistical estimation of reproduction numbers over time and space to facilitate disease control activities in Thailand.ResultsThe estimated basic reproduction number for COVID-19 during the study ranged from 2.23–5.90, with a mean of 3.75. We also tracked disease dynamics over time using temporal and spatiotemporal reproduction numbers. The results suggest that the outbreak was under control since the middle of April. After the boxing stadium and entertainment venues, the numbers of new cases had increased and spread across the country.DiscussionAlthough various scenarios about assumptions were explored in this study, the real situation was difficult to determine given the limited data. More thorough mathematical modelling would be helpful to improve the estimation of transmissibility metrics for emergency preparedness as more epidemiological and clinical information about this new infection becomes available. However, the results can be used to guide interventions directly and to help parameterize models to predict the impact of these interventions.

Highlights

  • Two critical pieces of information when a new emerging infectious disease epidemic occurs are the mechanism of disease transmission and how infectious it is

  • A new emerging and reemerging infectious disease can occur in one place and have the potential to widely spread, where everyone may be susceptible to the disease

  • The data in this study were from confirmed COVID-19 cases in 77 provinces of Thailand from January 12th 2020 through June 30th 2020 provided in the daily reports of the Department of Disease Control, Thai Ministry of Public Health (MOPH)

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Summary

Introduction

Two critical pieces of information when a new emerging infectious disease epidemic occurs are the mechanism of disease transmission and how infectious it is. In Thailand, COVID-19 caused by the new corona virus is a major public health concern declared as a national health emergency. In this situation policy makers have to make decisions in the presence of enormous uncertainty and it is crucial to have informed and effective decision making, during the epidemic when the real situation can be very dynamic. During such an outbreak, a large volume of data can be gathered from different sources. Thailand was one of the first countries outside China to be affected with subsequent importation and domestic spread in most provinces in the country

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