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A statistical analysis of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) in Italy and Spain

The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) that was first reported at the end of 2019 has impacted almost every aspect of life as we know it. This paper focuses on the incidence of the disease in Italy and Spain—two of the first and most affected European countries. Using two simple mathematical epidemiologic...

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Autor principal: Chu, Jeffrey
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7993852/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33765088
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0249037
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author Chu, Jeffrey
author_facet Chu, Jeffrey
author_sort Chu, Jeffrey
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description The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) that was first reported at the end of 2019 has impacted almost every aspect of life as we know it. This paper focuses on the incidence of the disease in Italy and Spain—two of the first and most affected European countries. Using two simple mathematical epidemiological models—the Susceptible-Infectious-Recovered model and the log-linear regression model, we model the daily and cumulative incidence of COVID-19 in the two countries during the early stage of the outbreak, and compute estimates for basic measures of the infectiousness of the disease including the basic reproduction number, growth rate, and doubling time. Estimates of the basic reproduction number were found to be larger than 1 in both countries, with values being between 2 and 3 for Italy, and 2.5 and 4 for Spain. Estimates were also computed for the more dynamic effective reproduction number, which showed that since the first cases were confirmed in the respective countries the severity has generally been decreasing. The predictive ability of the log-linear regression model was found to give a better fit and simple estimates of the daily incidence for both countries were computed.
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spelling pubmed-79938522021-04-05 A statistical analysis of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) in Italy and Spain Chu, Jeffrey PLoS One Research Article The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) that was first reported at the end of 2019 has impacted almost every aspect of life as we know it. This paper focuses on the incidence of the disease in Italy and Spain—two of the first and most affected European countries. Using two simple mathematical epidemiological models—the Susceptible-Infectious-Recovered model and the log-linear regression model, we model the daily and cumulative incidence of COVID-19 in the two countries during the early stage of the outbreak, and compute estimates for basic measures of the infectiousness of the disease including the basic reproduction number, growth rate, and doubling time. Estimates of the basic reproduction number were found to be larger than 1 in both countries, with values being between 2 and 3 for Italy, and 2.5 and 4 for Spain. Estimates were also computed for the more dynamic effective reproduction number, which showed that since the first cases were confirmed in the respective countries the severity has generally been decreasing. The predictive ability of the log-linear regression model was found to give a better fit and simple estimates of the daily incidence for both countries were computed. Public Library of Science 2021-03-25 /pmc/articles/PMC7993852/ /pubmed/33765088 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0249037 Text en © 2021 Jeffrey Chu http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Chu, Jeffrey
A statistical analysis of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) in Italy and Spain
title A statistical analysis of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) in Italy and Spain
title_full A statistical analysis of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) in Italy and Spain
title_fullStr A statistical analysis of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) in Italy and Spain
title_full_unstemmed A statistical analysis of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) in Italy and Spain
title_short A statistical analysis of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) in Italy and Spain
title_sort statistical analysis of the novel coronavirus (covid-19) in italy and spain
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7993852/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33765088
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0249037
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