Epidemiol Health Estimation of Reproduction Number (Ro) and Early Prediction of 2019 Novel Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) Outbreak in India Using Statistical Computing Approach

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Epidemiol Health


. 2020 May 9;e2020028.
doi: 10.4178/epih.e2020028. Online ahead of print.
Estimation of Reproduction Number (Ro) and Early Prediction of 2019 Novel Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) Outbreak in India Using Statistical Computing Approach


Karthick Kanagarathinam ¹ , Kavaskar Sekar ²



Affiliations

• PMID: 32512670
• DOI: 10.4178/epih.e2020028

Abstract

The novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is a pandemic and causes respiratory infection. The World Health Organization (WHO) announced it as a public health crisis of international concern. We developed susceptible-exposed-infected-removed (SEIR) model for COVID-19 to show the importance of estimation of reproduction number (R0). This work is focused on predicting the COVID-19 outbreak at the early stage in India based on estimation of reproduction number (R0). The developed model will help to take active measures prior to the spread of 2019-nCoV disease. The data of daily newly infective cases in India from 2nd March 2020 to 2nd April 2020 has been used as samples to obtain the reproduction number. The 'earlyR' package has been utilized for the estimation of R0. The Maximum-Likelihood approach has been carried out to the distribution of R0 and applied bootstrap strategy for resampling to maximize likely R0 values. We estimated the median value of Ro value as 1.471 (1.351-1.592) with 95% confidence interval (CI) and predicted that the new cases count may reach 39382 (34300-47351) in 30 days.

Keywords: 2019-nCoV; COVID-19; Forecasting; Novel Coronavirus; Reproduction number; Ro estimation.