Evaluating the effect of Chinese control measures on COVID-19 via temporal reproduction number estimation.

• Main Authors: Duanbing Chen, Tao Zhou
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Public Library of Science (PLoS) 2021-01-01
• Series: PLoS ONE
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0246715

Control measures are necessary to contain the spread of serious infectious diseases such as COVID-19, especially in its early stage. We propose to use temporal reproduction number an extension of effective reproduction number, to evaluate the efficacy of control measures, and establish a Monte-Carlo method to estimate the temporal reproduction number without complete information about symptom onsets. The province-level analysis indicates that the effective reproduction numbers of the majority of provinces in mainland China got down to < 1 just by one week from the setting of control measures, and the temporal reproduction number of the week [15 Feb, 21 Feb] is only about 0.18. It is therefore likely that Chinese control measures on COVID-19 are effective and efficient, though more research needs to be performed.