Transmission characteristics of the COVID-19 outbreak in China: a study driven by data
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The COVID-19 outbreak has been a serious public health threat worldwide. We use individually documented case descriptions of COVID-19 from China (excluding Hubei Province) to estimate the distributions of the generation time, incubation period, and periods from symptom onset to isolation and to diagnosis. The recommended 14-day quarantine period may lead to a 6.7% failure for quarantine. We recommend a 22-day quarantine period. The mean generation time is 3.3 days and the mean incubation period is 7.2 days. It took 3.7 days to isolate and 6.6 days to diagnose a patient after his/her symptom onset. Patients may become infectious on average 3.9 days before showing major symptoms. This makes contact tracing and quarantine ineffective. The basic reproduction number is estimated to be 1.54 with contact tracing, quarantine and isolation, mostly driven by super spreaders.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.024 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".