Potential roles of social distancing in mitigating the spread of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in South Korea

Sang Woo Park; Kaiyuan Sun; Cécile Viboud; Bryan T Grenfell; Jonathan Dushoff

doi:10.1101/2020.03.27.20045815

Potential roles of social distancing in mitigating the spread of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in South Korea

medRxiv [Preprint]. 2020 Mar 30:2020.03.27.20045815. doi: 10.1101/2020.03.27.20045815.

Authors

Sang Woo Park¹, Kaiyuan Sun², Cécile Viboud², Bryan T Grenfell^{1

2

3}, Jonathan Dushoff^{4

5

6}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA.
² Fogarty International Center, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, USA.
³ Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA.
⁴ Department of Mathematics and Statistics, McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada.
⁵ M. G. DeGroote Institute for Infectious Disease Research, McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada.
⁶ Department of Biology, McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada.

Abstract

On January 20, 2020, the first COVID-19 case was confirmed in South Korea. After a rapid outbreak, the number of incident cases has been consistently decreasing since early March; this decrease has been widely attributed to its intensive testing. We report here on the likely role of social distancing in reducing transmission in South Korea. Our analysis suggests that transmission may still be persisting in some regions.

Keywords: COVID-19; SARS-CoV-2; South Korea; coronavirus disease; social distancing.

Publication types

Preprint