Transmission potential and severity of COVID-19 in South Korea
Autor
Shim, Eunha
Tariq, Amna
Choi, Wongyeong
Lee, Yiseul
Chowell, Gerardo
Institución
Resumen
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 6284 cases including 42 deaths as of Mar 6,
2020. To examine the growth rate of the outbreak, we 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 COVID19. 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 an early sustained transmission of COVID-19 in South Korea and support
the implementation of social distancing measures to rapidly control the outbreak.
© 2020 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd on behalf of International Society for Infectious Diseases.
This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-ncnd/4.0/).