Determining how fast coronavirus spreads can help health authorities manage this public emergency. To achive this, a team of infectious disease researchers from the University of Texas at Austin investigated more than 450 infection case reports from 93 cities in China.
The study "Estimating Risk for Death from 2019 Novel Coronavirus Disease, China, January–February 2020" found that the period between cases in a series of transmission is less than a week.
Published in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases, the study disclosed that the average serial interval for the coronavirus in China was around four days.
The researchers, who are from the United States, France, China and Hong Kong, calculated the serial interval of the virus by examining the time it takes for symptoms to take effect in the individual who infects another and the infected second person.
Emerging outbreaks
Their data shows two factors that can affect the speed of an epidemic. The first is the reproduction number, or the number of people each case infects. The second is the serial interval, how long it takes for infection to spread among people.
According to the researchers, the short serial interval of COVID-19 involves emerging outbreaks that will immediately escalate and difficult to stop.
"Ebola, with a serial interval of several weeks, is much easier to contain than influenza, with a serial interval of only a few days. Public health responders to Ebola outbreaks have much more time to identify and isolate cases before they infect others," said Lauren Ancel Meyers, a professor of integrative biology at UT Austin.
"The data suggest that this coronavirus may spread like the flu. That means we need to move quickly and aggressively to curb the emerging threat."
Their study also suggests that more than one in 10 infections were from people who acquired the virus but did not yet feel any symptoms.
