Abstract
The emerging virus, COVID-19, has caused a massive outbreak worldwide. Based on the publicly available contact-tracing data, we identified 509 transmission chains from 20 provinces in China and estimated the serial interval (SI) and generation interval (GI) of COVID-19 in China. Inspired by different possible values of the time-varying reproduction number for the imported cases and the local cases in China, we divided all transmission events into three subsets: imported (the zeroth generation) infecting 1st-generation locals, 1st-generation locals infecting 2nd-generation locals, and other transmissions among 2+. The corresponding SI (GI) is respectively denoted as (), (), and (). A Bayesian approach with doubly interval-censored likelihood is employed to fit the distribution function of the SI and GI. It was found that the estimated , , , and , , . Thus, overall both SI and GI decrease when generation increases.
Highlights
As of April 21, 2020, COVID-19 has broken out in 213 countries, areas or territories, and the World Health Organization (WHO) has reported over 2, 356, 414 confirmed cases and over 160, 120 confirmed deaths [1]
For all 509 samples, the observed serial interval (SI) have a mean at μSI = 6.05 days and a standard deviation (SD) at δSI = 4.28 days
We first estimated SI based on 509 transmission events, which are divided into three subsets, including importedfirst subset E10, local first-second subset E21 and local second-third plus subset E32++
Summary
As of April 21, 2020, COVID-19 has broken out in 213 countries, areas or territories, and the World Health Organization (WHO) has reported over 2, 356, 414 confirmed cases and over 160, 120 confirmed deaths [1]. It is a huge challenge to plan intervention strategies aimed at controlling outbreaks of COVID-19 in all countries, areas, or territories [2]. The basic and time-varying reproduction numbers are good indicators of the speed of disease spread and the effectiveness of interventions. The estimation of the basic and time-varying reproduction number often requires SI.
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