PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Shi Zhao
AU  - Qianyin Lin
AU  - Jinjun Ran
AU  - Salihu S Musa
AU  - Guangpu Yang
AU  - Weiming Wang
AU  - Yijun Lou
AU  - Daozhou Gao
AU  - Lin Yang
AU  - Daihai He
AU  - Maggie H Wang
TI  - Preliminary estimation of the basic reproduction number of novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) in China, from 2019 to 2020: A data-driven analysis in the early phase of the outbreak
AID  - 10.1101/2020.01.23.916395
DP  - 2020 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 2020.01.23.916395
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/01/29/2020.01.23.916395.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/01/29/2020.01.23.916395.full
AB  - Backgrounds An ongoing outbreak of a novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) pneumonia hit a major city of China, Wuhan, December 2019 and subsequently reached other provinces/regions of China and countries. We present estimates of the basic reproduction number, R0, of 2019-nCoV in the early phase of the outbreak.Methods Accounting for the impact of the variations in disease reporting rate, we modelled the epidemic curve of 2019-nCoV cases time series, in mainland China from January 10 to January 24, 2020, through the exponential growth. With the estimated intrinsic growth rate (γ), we estimated R0 by using the serial intervals (SI) of two other well-known coronavirus diseases, MERS and SARS, as approximations for the true unknown SI.Findings The early outbreak data largely follows the exponential growth. We estimated that the mean R0 ranges from 2.24 (95%CI: 1.96-2.55) to 3.58 (95%CI: 2.89-4.39) associated with 8-fold to 2-fold increase in the reporting rate. We demonstrated that changes in reporting rate substantially affect estimates of R0.Conclusion The mean estimate of R0 for the 2019-nCoV ranges from 2.24 to 3.58, and significantly larger than 1. Our findings indicate the potential of 2019-nCoV to cause outbreaks.