Evaluating Transmission Heterogeneity and Super-Spreading Event of COVID-19 in a Metropolis of China.

ABSTRACT: COVID-19 caused rapid mass infection worldwide. Understanding its transmission characteristics, including heterogeneity and the emergence of super spreading events (SSEs) where certain individuals infect large numbers of secondary cases, is of vital importance for prediction and intervention of future epidemics. Here, we collected information of all infected cases (135 cases) between 21 January and 26 February 2020 from official public sources in Tianjin, a metropolis of China, and grouped them into 43 transmission chains with the largest chain of 45 cases and the longest chain of four generations. Utilizing a heterogeneous transmission model based on branching process along with a negative binomial offspring distribution, we estimated the reproductive number R and the dispersion pa

SUBMITTER: Zhang Y 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7277812 | biostudies-literature | 2020 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature