UMMS Affiliation
Department of Emergency Medicine at UMMS-Baystate
Publication Date
2020-03-31
Document Type
Article Preprint
Disciplines
Analytical, Diagnostic and Therapeutic Techniques and Equipment | Clinical Epidemiology | Environmental Public Health | Epidemiology | Immunology and Infectious Disease | Infectious Disease | Respiratory Tract Diseases | Virus Diseases
Abstract
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a novel human respiratory disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Asymptomatic carriers of the virus display no clinical symptoms but are known to be contagious. Recent evidence reveals that this sub-population, as well as persons with mild, represent a major contributor in the propagation of COVID-19. The asymptomatic sub-population frequently escapes detection by public health surveillance systems. Because of this, the currently accepted estimates of the basic reproduction number (Ro) of the virus are inaccurate. It is unlikely that a pathogen can blanket the planet in three months with an Ro in the vicinity of 3, as reported in the literature. In this manuscript, we present a mathematical model taking into account asymptomatic carriers. Our results indicate that an initial value of the effective reproduction number could range from 5.5 to 25.4, with a point estimate of 15.4, assuming mean parameters. The first three weeks of the model exhibit exponential growth, which is in agreement with average case data collected from thirteen countries with universal health care and robust communicable disease surveillance systems; the average rate of growth in the number of reported cases is 23.3% per day during this period.
Keywords
epidemiology, coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), SARS-CoV-2 virus, transmission, asymptomatic carriers, pandemic, basic reproduction number
Rights and Permissions
The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not peer-reviewed) is the author/funder. It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license.
DOI of Published Version
10.1101/2020.03.18.20037994
Source
medRxiv 2020.03.18.20037994; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.03.18.20037994. Link to preprint on medRxiv service
Journal/Book/Conference Title
medRxiv
Repository Citation
Aguilar JB, Faust JS, Westafer LM, Gutierrez JB. (2020). Investigating the Impact of Asymptomatic Carriers on COVID-19 Transmission. COVID-19 Publications by UMMS Authors. https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.03.18.20037994. Retrieved from https://escholarship.umassmed.edu/covid19/6
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Included in
Analytical, Diagnostic and Therapeutic Techniques and Equipment Commons, Clinical Epidemiology Commons, Environmental Public Health Commons, Epidemiology Commons, Immunology and Infectious Disease Commons, Infectious Disease Commons, Respiratory Tract Diseases Commons, Virus Diseases Commons