Basic reproduction number projection for novel pandemics and variants. Ancestral SARS-CoV2 R0 projection

Abstract

The recently derived Hybrid-Incidence Susceptible-Transmissible-Removed (HI-STR) prototype is a deterministic epidemic compartment model and an alternative to the Susceptible-Infected-Removed (SIR) model prototype. The HI-STR predicts that pathogen transmission depends on host population characteristics including population size, population density and some common host behavioural characteristics. The HI-STR prototype is applied to the ancestral Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV2) to show that the original estimates of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) basic reproduction number ($\mathcal{R}_0$) for the United Kingdom (UK) could have been projected on the individual states of the United States of America (USA) prior to being detected in the USA. The Imperial College London (ICL) R0 estimate for the UK is projected onto each USA state. The difference between these projections and ICL estimates for USA states is either not statistically significant on the paired student t-test or epidemiologically insignificant. Projection provides a baseline for evaluating the real-time impact of an intervention. Sensitivity analysis was conducted because of considerable variance in parameter estimates across studies. Although the HI-STR predicts that increasing symptomatic ratio and inherently immune ratio reduce R0, relative to the uncertainty in the estimates of R0 for the ancestral SARS-CoV2, the projection is insensitive to the inherently immune ratio and the symptomatic ratio.