Background: As reported by the World Health Organization, a novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) was identified as the\ncausative virus of Wuhan pneumonia of unknown etiology by Chinese authorities on 7 January, 2020. The virus was\nnamed as severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) by International Committee on Taxonomy\nof Viruses on 11 February, 2020. This study aimed to develop a mathematical model for calculating the\ntransmissibility of the virus.\nMethods: In this study, we developed a Bats-Hosts-Reservoir-People transmission network model for simulating the\npotential transmission from the infection source (probably be bats) to the human infection. Since the Bats-Hosts-\nReservoir network was hard to explore clearly and public concerns were focusing on the transmission from Huanan\nSeafood Wholesale Market (reservoir) to people, we simplified the model as Reservoir-People (RP) transmission\nnetwork model. The next generation matrix approach was adopted to calculate the basic reproduction number (R0)\nfrom the RP model to assess the transmissibility of the SARS-CoV-2.\nResults: The value of R0 was estimated of 2.30 from reservoir to person and 3.58 from person to person which\nmeans that the expected number of secondary infections that result from introducing a single infected individual\ninto an otherwise susceptible population was 3.58.\nConclusions: Our model showed that the transmissibility of SARS-CoV-2 was higher than the Middle East\nrespiratory syndrome in the Middle East countries, similar to severe acute respiratory syndrome, but lower than\nMERS in the Republic of Korea.
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