key: cord-0704702-kgbf33ky
authors: Zhao, Shi; Liang, Xue
title: A re-analysis to identify the structural breaks in the COVID-19 transmissibility during the early phase of the outbreak in South Korea
date: 2020-08-28
journal: Int J Infect Dis
DOI: 10.1016/j.ijid.2020.08.061
sha: 8d3d591a8e38064f08a7c3c755f1c99825a2196c
doc_id: 704702
cord_uid: kgbf33ky

nan

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Exploring the temporal patterns of the COVID-19 transmission is of importance in understanding the features of COVID-19 and developing control strategies (1). By using the 'SIR'-based compartmental model, one breakpoint, i.e., 7 March 2020, with a drop in the transmission rate was estimated in the COVID-19 outbreak in South Korea (2) . In this study, we re-analysis the outbreak in South Korea and argue that there was more than one structural break in the COVID-19 transmissibility. Considering the large difference in AICs between the models with one and two knots, we show their fitting results in Fig 1B for comparison.

The modelling framework in (2) is equivalent to assume that Rt changes as a discontinuous function, i.e., in a 'step' function scheme. In this study, with a continuous modelling scheme in Rt, there may be more than one structural break in the changing patterns of COVID-19 transmissibility, which appears more statistically reasonable.

Not applicable.

The COVID-19 surveillance data used in this work are collected in the public domain via https://covid19.who.int/region/wpro/country/kr.

The authors declare no competing interests.

This work is not funded. Rt series with two breakpoints. The vertical pink lines highlight the two breakpoints (for the red curve).

Monitoring disease transmissibility of 2019 novel coronavirus disease in Zhejiang

Estimating a breakpoint in the spread pattern of COVID-19 in South Korea

A new framework and software to estimate time-varying reproduction numbers during epidemics

Quantifying SARS-CoV-2 transmission suggests epidemic control with digital contact tracing

Estimating the generation interval for coronavirus disease (COVID-19) based on symptom onset data

SZ conceived study, collected the data, conducted the analysis, discussed the results, drafted, and critically revised manuscript. All authors read the manuscript and approved for publication.