Evidence and characteristics of human-to-human transmission of SARS-CoV-2
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Abstract
Background
On December 31, 2019, an outbreak of COVID-19 in humans was reported in Wuhan, and then spread fast to other provinces, China. We analyzed data from field investigations and genetic sequencing to describe the evidence and characteristics of human-to-human transmission in Guangdong Province.
Methods
A confirmed COVID-19 case was defined if a suspected case was verified with positive of SARS-CoV-2 in throat swabs, nasal swabs, bronchoalveolar lavage fluid (BALF), or endotracheal aspirates by real-time reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction assay (RT-PCR) or genetic sequencing. Field investigations were conducted for each confirmed case. Clinical and demographic data of confirmed cases were collected from medical records. Exposure and travel history were obtained by interview.
Results
A total of 1,151 confirmed cases were identified as of February 10, 2020 in Guangdong Province, China. Of them, 697 (60.1%) cases were from 234 cluster infections. Two hundred and fourteen (18.6%) were secondary cases, in which 144 cases were from family cluster infections. With the epidemic continuing, although familial cluster events were dominated, community cluster events increased with a nosocomial event. The whole genomes within the same family cluster infections were identical, and presented a few unique single nucleotide variants (SNVs) compared with SARS-CoV-2 identified on December 2019 in Wuhan.
Conclusions
We observed evident human-to-human transmissions of SARS-CoV-2 in Guangdong, China. Although most of them were from family cluster infections, community and nosocomial infections were increasing. Our findings indicate that human-to-human transmission risks are transferring from family to community in Guangdong Province.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2020.02.03.20019141: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Institutional Review Board Statement IRB: Ethics Approval: Data collection and analysis of cases and close contacts were determined by the National Health Commission of the People’s Republic of China to be part of a continuing public health outbreak investigation and were thus considered exempt from institutional review board approval. Randomization not detected. Blinding not detected. Power Analysis not detected. Sex as a biological variable not detected. Table 2: Resources
Software and Algorithms Sentences Resources Pair-end sequencing was performed on Miseq (Illumina, USA). Miseqsuggested: (A5-miseq, RRID:SCR_012148)Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your data.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: An …SciScore for 10.1101/2020.02.03.20019141: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Institutional Review Board Statement IRB: Ethics Approval: Data collection and analysis of cases and close contacts were determined by the National Health Commission of the People’s Republic of China to be part of a continuing public health outbreak investigation and were thus considered exempt from institutional review board approval. Randomization not detected. Blinding not detected. Power Analysis not detected. Sex as a biological variable not detected. Table 2: Resources
Software and Algorithms Sentences Resources Pair-end sequencing was performed on Miseq (Illumina, USA). Miseqsuggested: (A5-miseq, RRID:SCR_012148)Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your data.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: An explicit section about the limitations of the techniques employed in this study was not found. We encourage authors to address study limitations.Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.
Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.
Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.
Results from rtransparent:- Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- No protocol registration statement was detected.
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