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A new interesting article has been published in Int J Infect Dis. 2020 Mar 17. pii: S1201-9712(20)30150-8. doi: 10.1016/j.ijid.2020.03.031. [Epub ahead of print] and titled:

Transmission potential and severity of COVID-19 in South Korea.

Authors of this article are:

Shim E, Tariq A, Choi W, Lee Y, Chowell G.

A summary of the article is shown below:

OBJECTIVES: Since the first case of 2019 novel coronavirus (COVID-19) identified on Jan 20, 2020 in South Korea, the number of cases rapidly increased, resulting in 6,284 cases including 42 deaths as of March 6, 2020. To examine the growth rate of the outbreak, we aimed to present the first study to report the reproduction number of COVID-19 in South Korea.METHODS: The daily confirmed cases of COVID-19 in South Korea were extracted from publicly available sources. By using the empirical reporting delay distribution and simulating the generalized growth model, we estimated the effective reproduction number based on the discretized probability distribution of the generation interval.RESULTS: We identified four major clusters and estimated the reproduction number at 1.5 (95% CI: 1.4-1.6). In addition, the intrinsic growth rate was estimated at 0.6 (95% CI: 0.6, 0.7) and the scaling of growth parameter was estimated at 0.8 (95% CI: 0.7, 0.8), indicating sub-exponential growth dynamics of COVID-19. The crude case fatality rate is higher among males (1.1%) compared to females (0.4%) and increases with older age.CONCLUSIONS: Our results indicate early sustained transmission of COVID-19 in South Korea and support the implementation of social distancing measures to rapidly control the outbreak.Copyright © 2020. Published by Elsevier Ltd.

Check out the article’s website on Pubmed for more information:

[link-preview url=https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32198088 forceshot=true]

This article is a good source of information and a good way to become familiar with topics such as: COVID-19; Korea; coronavirus; reproduction number.

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