Estimation of Infection Rate and Prediction of Initial Infected Individuals of COVID-19

TL;DR

This paper models COVID-19 spread using the SIQRk framework to estimate infection rates, initial cases, and epidemic duration, providing insights into early pandemic dynamics across countries.

Contribution

It introduces a method to estimate infection parameters and initial infected individuals using early reported data within the SIQRk model framework.

Findings

Infection rate range between 0.233 and 0.462

Basic reproduction number R0 between 1.8 and 3.5

Maximum infection duration estimated at about six months in Germany

Abstract

We consider the pandemic spreading of COVID-19 for some selected countries after the outbreak of the coronavirus in Wuhan City, China. We estimated the infection rate and the initial infected individuals of COVID-19 by using the officially reported data at the early stage of the epidemic for the susceptible (S), infectable (I), quarantined (Q), and the cofirmed recovered (Rk) population model, so called SIQRk model. In the reported data we know the quarantined cases and the recovered cases. We can not know the recovered cases from the asymptomatic cases. In the SIQRk model we can estimated the model parameters and the initial infecting cases (confirmed ans asymtomatic cases) from the data fits. We obtained the infection rate in the range between 0.233 and 0.462, the basic reproduction number Ro in the range between 1.8 and 3.5, and the initial number of infected individuals in the range betwee 10 and 8409 for some selected countries. By using fitting parameters we estimated the maximum time of the infection for Germany when the government are performing the quarantine policy. The disease is undergoing to the calm state about six months after first patients were identified.