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Monitoring Transmissibility and Mortality of COVID-19 in Europe.
OBJECTIVES: As a global pandemic is inevitable, real-time monitoring of transmission is vital for containing the spread of COVID-19. The main objective was to report real-time effective reproduction numbers (R(t)) case fatality rate (CFR).
METHODS: Data were mainly obtained from WHO website, up to 9 March 2020. R(t) was estimated by exponential growth rate (EG) and time dependent (TD) methods. "R0" package in R was employed to estimate R(t) by fitting the existing epidemic curve. Both naïve CFR (nCFR) and adjust CFR (aCFR) were estimated.
RESULTS: In EG method, R(t) was 3.27 [3.17-3.38] for Italy, 6.32 [5.72-6.99] for France, 6.07 [5.51-6.69] for Germany, 5.08 [4.51-5.74] for Spain. With TD method, the R value for March 9 was 3.10 [2.21-4.11] for Italy, 6.56 [2.04-12.26] for France, 4.43 [1.83-7.92] for Germany, and 3.95 [0-10.19] for Spain.
CONCLUSIONS: This study provides important findings on an early outbreak of COVID-19 in Europe. Due to the recent rapid increase in new cases of COVID-19, real-time monitoring of the transmissibility and mortality in Spain and France is a priority.
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