Preliminary estimating the reproduction number of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak in Republic of Korea from 31 January to 1 March 2020

The novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak in Republic of Korea has caused 3736 cases and 18 deaths by 1 March 2020. We modeled the transmission process in Republic of Korea with a stochastic model and estimated the basic reproduction number R ₀ as 2.6 (95%CI: 2.3-2.9) and 3.2 (95%CI: 2.9-3.5), under the assumption that the exponential growth starting 31 January and 5 February, 2020, respectively. Estimates of dispersion term ( k ) were larger than 10 significantly, which implies few super-spreading events..