A Method to Model Outbreaks of New Infectious Diseases with Pandemic Potential such as COVID-19
Willem G Odendaal
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.03.11.20034512
Abstract
The emergence of the novel coronavirus (a.k.a. COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2) out of Wuhan, Hubei Province, China caught the world by surprise. As the outbreak began to spread outside of China, too little was known about the virus to model its transmission with any acceptable accuracy. World governments responded to rampant minformation about the virus leading to collatoral disasters, such as plunging financial markets, that could have been avoided if better models of the outbreak had been available. This is an engineering approach to model the spread of a new infectious disease from sparse data when little is known about the infectious agent itself. The most sought after estimate is the projected number of people who may be contagious, but still be within the incubation period thus remaining asymptomatic and undetected.
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