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Estimating the reproductive number R(0) of SARS-CoV-2 in the United States and eight European countries and implications for vaccination
SARS-CoV-2 rapidly spread from a regional outbreak to a global pandemic in just a few months. Global research efforts have focused on developing effective vaccines against COVID-19. However, some of the basic epidemiological parameters, such as the exponential epidemic growth rate and the basic repr...
Autores principales: | , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd.
2021
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7880839/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33587929 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jtbi.2021.110621 |
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author | Ke, Ruian Romero-Severson, Ethan Sanche, Steven Hengartner, Nick |
author_facet | Ke, Ruian Romero-Severson, Ethan Sanche, Steven Hengartner, Nick |
author_sort | Ke, Ruian |
collection | PubMed |
description | SARS-CoV-2 rapidly spread from a regional outbreak to a global pandemic in just a few months. Global research efforts have focused on developing effective vaccines against COVID-19. However, some of the basic epidemiological parameters, such as the exponential epidemic growth rate and the basic reproductive number, R(0), across geographic areas are still not well quantified. Here, we developed and fit a mathematical model to case and death count data collected from the United States and eight European countries during the early epidemic period before broad control measures were implemented. Results show that the early epidemic grew exponentially at rates between 0.18 and 0.29/day (epidemic doubling times between 2.4 and 3.9 days). We found that for such rapid epidemic growth, high levels of intervention efforts are necessary, no matter the goal is mitigation or containment. We discuss the current estimates of the mean serial interval, and argue that existing evidence suggests that the interval is between 6 and 8 days in the absence of active isolation efforts. Using parameters consistent with this range, we estimated the median R(0) value to be 5.8 (confidence interval: 4.7–7.3) in the United States and between 3.6 and 6.1 in the eight European countries. We further analyze how vaccination schedules depend on R(0), the duration of protective immunity to SARS-CoV-2, and show that individual-level heterogeneity in vaccine induced immunity can significantly affect vaccination schedules. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-7880839 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2021 |
publisher | The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-78808392021-02-16 Estimating the reproductive number R(0) of SARS-CoV-2 in the United States and eight European countries and implications for vaccination Ke, Ruian Romero-Severson, Ethan Sanche, Steven Hengartner, Nick J Theor Biol Article SARS-CoV-2 rapidly spread from a regional outbreak to a global pandemic in just a few months. Global research efforts have focused on developing effective vaccines against COVID-19. However, some of the basic epidemiological parameters, such as the exponential epidemic growth rate and the basic reproductive number, R(0), across geographic areas are still not well quantified. Here, we developed and fit a mathematical model to case and death count data collected from the United States and eight European countries during the early epidemic period before broad control measures were implemented. Results show that the early epidemic grew exponentially at rates between 0.18 and 0.29/day (epidemic doubling times between 2.4 and 3.9 days). We found that for such rapid epidemic growth, high levels of intervention efforts are necessary, no matter the goal is mitigation or containment. We discuss the current estimates of the mean serial interval, and argue that existing evidence suggests that the interval is between 6 and 8 days in the absence of active isolation efforts. Using parameters consistent with this range, we estimated the median R(0) value to be 5.8 (confidence interval: 4.7–7.3) in the United States and between 3.6 and 6.1 in the eight European countries. We further analyze how vaccination schedules depend on R(0), the duration of protective immunity to SARS-CoV-2, and show that individual-level heterogeneity in vaccine induced immunity can significantly affect vaccination schedules. The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. 2021-05-21 2021-02-13 /pmc/articles/PMC7880839/ /pubmed/33587929 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jtbi.2021.110621 Text en © 2021 The Author(s) Since January 2020 Elsevier has created a COVID-19 resource centre with free information in English and Mandarin on the novel coronavirus COVID-19. The COVID-19 resource centre is hosted on Elsevier Connect, the company's public news and information website. Elsevier hereby grants permission to make all its COVID-19-related research that is available on the COVID-19 resource centre - including this research content - immediately available in PubMed Central and other publicly funded repositories, such as the WHO COVID database with rights for unrestricted research re-use and analyses in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for free by Elsevier for as long as the COVID-19 resource centre remains active. |
spellingShingle | Article Ke, Ruian Romero-Severson, Ethan Sanche, Steven Hengartner, Nick Estimating the reproductive number R(0) of SARS-CoV-2 in the United States and eight European countries and implications for vaccination |
title | Estimating the reproductive number R(0) of SARS-CoV-2 in the United States and eight European countries and implications for vaccination |
title_full | Estimating the reproductive number R(0) of SARS-CoV-2 in the United States and eight European countries and implications for vaccination |
title_fullStr | Estimating the reproductive number R(0) of SARS-CoV-2 in the United States and eight European countries and implications for vaccination |
title_full_unstemmed | Estimating the reproductive number R(0) of SARS-CoV-2 in the United States and eight European countries and implications for vaccination |
title_short | Estimating the reproductive number R(0) of SARS-CoV-2 in the United States and eight European countries and implications for vaccination |
title_sort | estimating the reproductive number r(0) of sars-cov-2 in the united states and eight european countries and implications for vaccination |
topic | Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7880839/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33587929 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jtbi.2021.110621 |
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