Key info


Date:
11 March 2020

Authors:
Katy Gaythorpe, Natsuko Imai, Gina Cuomo-Dannenburg, Marc Baguelin, Sangeeta Bhatia, Adhiratha Boonyasiri, Anne Cori, Zulma Cucunubá, Amy Dighe, Ilaria Dorigatti, Rich FitzJohn, Han Fu, Will Green, Arran Hamlet, Wes Hinsley, Daniel Laydon, Gemma Nedjati-Gilani, Lucy Okell, Steven Riley, Hayley Thompson, Sabine Van Elsland, Erik Volz, Haowei Wang, Yuanrong Wang, Charles Whittaker, Xiaoyue Xi, Christl A. Donnelly, Azra Ghani, Neil M. Ferguson. With support from other volunteers from the MRC Centre.

Correspondence:
Professor Neil Ferguson
neil.ferguson@imperial.ac.uk

Download the full PDF for Report 8 See all reports

WHO Collaborating Centre for Infectious Disease Modelling; MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis; Abdul Latif Jameel Institute for Disease and Emergency Analytics; Imperial College London, UK

Summary

The COVID-19 epidemic was declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) by WHO on 30 January 2020. As of 8 March 2020, over 107,000 cases had been reported. Here, we use published and preprint studies of clinical characteristics of cases in mainland China as well as case studies of individuals from Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore and South Korea to examine the proportional occurrence of symptoms and the progression of symptoms through time.

We find that in mainland China, where specific symptoms or disease presentation are reported, pneumonia is the most frequently mentioned, see figure 1.  We found a more varied spectrum of severity in cases outside mainland China. In Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore and South Korea, fever was the most frequently reported symptom. In this latter group, presentation with pneumonia is not reported as frequently although it is more common in individuals over 60 years old. The average time from reported onset of first symptoms to the occurrence of specific symptoms or disease presentation, such as pneumonia or the use of mechanical ventilation, varied substantially. The average time to presentation with pneumonia is 5.88 days, and may be linked to testing at hospitalisation; fever is often reported at onset (where the mean time to develop fever is 0.77 days).

Appendix data sources

Data on cases in international travellers: subset_international_cases_2020_03_11.csv

Translations

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