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Could the new coronavirus have infected humans prior November 2019?
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SYSNO ASEP 0545843 Document Type J - Journal Article R&D Document Type Journal Article Subsidiary J Článek ve WOS Title Could the new coronavirus have infected humans prior November 2019? Author(s) Tichopád, A. (CZ)
Pecen, Ladislav (UIVT-O) RID, SAI, ORCID
Sedlák, V. (CZ)Number of authors 3 Source Title PLoS ONE. - : Public Library of Science - ISSN 1932-6203
Roč. 16, č. 8 (2021), e0248255Number of pages 9 s. Publication form Online - E Language eng - English Country US - United States Keywords SARS-CoV-2 virus ; epidemic curve ; day-zero ; log-linear analysis OECD category Infectious Diseases Method of publishing Open access Institutional support UIVT-O - RVO:67985807 UT WOS 000686373300029 EID SCOPUS 85113323581 DOI 10.1371/journal.pone.0248255 Annotation The pandemic caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus is believed to originate in China from where it spread to other parts of the world. The first cluster of diseased individuals was reported in China as early as in December 2019. It has also been well established that the virus stroke Italy later in January or in February 2020, hence distinctly after the outbreak in China. The work by Apolone et al. published in the Italian Medical Journal in November 2020 and retracted upon expression of concern on 22 March 2021, however propose that the virus could have stroke people already in September 2019, possibly following even earlier outbreak in China. By fitting an early part of the epidemic curve with the exponential and extrapolating it backwards, we could estimate the day-zero of the epidemic and calculated its confidence intervals in Italy and China. We also calculated how probable it is that Italy encountered the virus prior 1 January 2020. We determined an early portion of the epidemic curve representing unhindered exponential growth which fit the exponential model with high determination >0.97 in both countries. We conservatively suggest that the day-zero in China and Italy was 8 December 2019 (95% CI: 3 Dec., 20 Dec.) and 22 January 2020 (95% CI: 16 Jan., 29 Jan.), respectively. Given the uncertainty of the very early data in China and adjusting hence our model to fit the exponentially behaved data only, we can even admit that the pandemic originated through November 2019 (95% CI: 31 Oct., 22 Dec.). With high confidence (p <0.01) China encountered the virus prior Italy. We generally view any pre-pandemic presence of the virus in humans before November 2019 as very unlikely. The later established dynamics of the epidemics data suggests that the country of the origin was China. Workplace Institute of Computer Science Contact Tereza Šírová, sirova@cs.cas.cz, Tel.: 266 053 800 Year of Publishing 2022 Electronic address http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0248255
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