Evidence for transmission of COVID-19 prior to symptom onset

  1. Lauren C Tindale
  2. Jessica E Stockdale
  3. Michelle Coombe
  4. Emma S Garlock
  5. Wing Yin Venus Lau
  6. Manu Saraswat
  7. Louxin Zhang
  8. Dongxuan Chen
  9. Jacco Wallinga
  10. Caroline Colijn  Is a corresponding author
  1. University of British Columbia, Canada
  2. Simon Fraser University, Canada
  3. National University of Singapore, Singapore
  4. National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, Netherlands
  5. Leiden University Medical Center, Netherlands

Abstract

We collated contact tracing data from COVID-19 clusters in Singapore and Tianjin, China and estimated the extent of pre-symptomatic transmission by estimating incubation periods and serial intervals. The mean incubation periods accounting for intermediate cases were 4.91 days (95%CI 4.35, 5.69) and 7.54 (95%CI 6.76, 8.56) days for Singapore and Tianjin, respectively. The mean serial interval was 4.17 (95%CI 2.44, 5.89) and 4.31 (95%CI 2.91, 5.72) days (Singapore, Tianjin). The serial intervals are shorter than incubation periods, suggesting that pre-symptomatic transmission may occur in a large proportion of transmission events (0.4-0.5 in Singapore and 0.6-0.8 in Tianjin, in our analysis with intermediate cases, and more without intermediates). Given the evidence for pre-symptomatic transmission it is vital that even individuals who appear healthy abide by public health measures to control COVID-19.

Data availability

Data are available on github at github.com/CSSEGISandData/COVID-19. Code to produce all analyses is also available there. Source data files of the Singapore and Tianjin clusters have been provided.

Article and author information

Author details

  1. Lauren C Tindale

    Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
    Competing interests
    No competing interests declared.
  2. Jessica E Stockdale

    Mathematics, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, Canada
    Competing interests
    No competing interests declared.
  3. Michelle Coombe

    School of Population and Public Health, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
    Competing interests
    No competing interests declared.
  4. Emma S Garlock

    Molecular Biology and Biochemistry, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, Canada
    Competing interests
    No competing interests declared.
  5. Wing Yin Venus Lau

    Molecular Biology and Biochemistry, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, Canada
    Competing interests
    No competing interests declared.
  6. Manu Saraswat

    Centre for Molecular Medicine and Therapeutics, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
    Competing interests
    No competing interests declared.
  7. Louxin Zhang

    Department of Mathematics, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore
    Competing interests
    No competing interests declared.
    ORCID icon "This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0003-0260-824X
  8. Dongxuan Chen

    Centre for Infectious Disease Control, National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, Bilthoven, Netherlands
    Competing interests
    No competing interests declared.
  9. Jacco Wallinga

    Faculteit Geneeskunde, Leiden University Medical Center, Leiden, Netherlands
    Competing interests
    Jacco Wallinga, Reviewing editor, eLife.
  10. Caroline Colijn

    Mathematics, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, Canada
    For correspondence
    ccolijn@sfu.ca
    Competing interests
    Caroline Colijn, Reviewing editor, eLife.
    ORCID icon "This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0001-6097-6708

Funding

Government of Canada (Canada 150 Research Chair program)

  • Caroline Colijn

The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.

Reviewing Editor

  1. Marc Lipsitch, Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, United States

Publication history

  1. Received: March 23, 2020
  2. Accepted: June 21, 2020
  3. Accepted Manuscript published: June 22, 2020 (version 1)
  4. Version of Record published: July 28, 2020 (version 2)

Copyright

© 2020, Tindale et al.

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.

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  1. Lauren C Tindale
  2. Jessica E Stockdale
  3. Michelle Coombe
  4. Emma S Garlock
  5. Wing Yin Venus Lau
  6. Manu Saraswat
  7. Louxin Zhang
  8. Dongxuan Chen
  9. Jacco Wallinga
  10. Caroline Colijn
(2020)
Evidence for transmission of COVID-19 prior to symptom onset
eLife 9:e57149.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.57149

Further reading

    1. Computational and Systems Biology
    2. Epidemiology and Global Health
    Oliver Robinson, Chung-Ho E Lau ... Martine Vrijheid
    Research Article

    Background: While biological age in adults is often understood as representing general health and resilience, the conceptual interpretation of accelerated biological age in children and its relationship to development remains unclear. We aimed to clarify the relationship of accelerated biological age, assessed through two established biological age indicators, telomere length and DNA methylation age, and two novel candidate biological age indicators , to child developmental outcomes, including growth and adiposity, cognition, behaviour, lung function and onset of puberty, among European school-age children participating in the HELIX exposome cohort.

    Methods: The study population included up to 1,173 children, aged between 5 and 12 years, from study centres in the UK, France, Spain, Norway, Lithuania, and Greece. Telomere length was measured through qPCR, blood DNA methylation and gene expression was measured using microarray, and proteins and metabolites were measured by a range of targeted assays. DNA methylation age was assessed using Horvath's skin and blood clock, while novel blood transcriptome and 'immunometabolic' (based on plasma protein and urinary and serum metabolite data) clocks were derived and tested in a subset of children assessed six months after the main follow-up visit. Associations between biological age indicators with child developmental measures as well as health risk factors were estimated using linear regression, adjusted for chronological age, sex, ethnicity and study centre. The clock derived markers were expressed as Δ age (i.e., predicted minus chronological age).

    Results: Transcriptome and immunometabolic clocks predicted chronological age well in the test set (r= 0.93 and r= 0.84 respectively). Generally, weak correlations were observed, after adjustment for chronological age, between the biological age indicators. Among associations with health risk factors, higher birthweight was associated with greater immunometabolic Δ age, smoke exposure with greater DNA methylation Δ age and high family affluence with longer telomere length. Among associations with child developmental measures, all biological age markers were associated with greater BMI and fat mass, and all markers except telomere length were associated with greater height, at least at nominal significance (p<0.05). Immunometabolic Δ age was associated with better working memory (p = 4e -3) and reduced inattentiveness (p= 4e -4), while DNA methylation Δ age was associated with greater inattentiveness (p=0.03) and poorer externalizing behaviours (p= 0.01). Shorter telomere length was also associated with poorer externalizing behaviours (p=0.03).

    Conclusions: In children, as in adults, biological ageing appears to be a multi-faceted process and adiposity is an important correlate of accelerated biological ageing. Patterns of associations suggested that accelerated immunometabolic age may be beneficial for some aspects of child development while accelerated DNA methylation age and telomere attrition may reflect early detrimental aspects of biological ageing, apparent even in children.

    Funding: UK Research and Innovation (MR/S03532X/1); European Commission (grant agreement numbers: 308333; 874583).

    1. Epidemiology and Global Health
    Katharine Sherratt, Hugo Gruson ... Sebastian Funk
    Research Article Updated

    Background:

    Short-term forecasts of infectious disease burden can contribute to situational awareness and aid capacity planning. Based on best practice in other fields and recent insights in infectious disease epidemiology, one can maximise the predictive performance of such forecasts if multiple models are combined into an ensemble. Here, we report on the performance of ensembles in predicting COVID-19 cases and deaths across Europe between 08 March 2021 and 07 March 2022.

    Methods:

    We used open-source tools to develop a public European COVID-19 Forecast Hub. We invited groups globally to contribute weekly forecasts for COVID-19 cases and deaths reported by a standardised source for 32 countries over the next 1–4 weeks. Teams submitted forecasts from March 2021 using standardised quantiles of the predictive distribution. Each week we created an ensemble forecast, where each predictive quantile was calculated as the equally-weighted average (initially the mean and then from 26th July the median) of all individual models’ predictive quantiles. We measured the performance of each model using the relative Weighted Interval Score (WIS), comparing models’ forecast accuracy relative to all other models. We retrospectively explored alternative methods for ensemble forecasts, including weighted averages based on models’ past predictive performance.

    Results:

    Over 52 weeks, we collected forecasts from 48 unique models. We evaluated 29 models’ forecast scores in comparison to the ensemble model. We found a weekly ensemble had a consistently strong performance across countries over time. Across all horizons and locations, the ensemble performed better on relative WIS than 83% of participating models’ forecasts of incident cases (with a total N=886 predictions from 23 unique models), and 91% of participating models’ forecasts of deaths (N=763 predictions from 20 models). Across a 1–4 week time horizon, ensemble performance declined with longer forecast periods when forecasting cases, but remained stable over 4 weeks for incident death forecasts. In every forecast across 32 countries, the ensemble outperformed most contributing models when forecasting either cases or deaths, frequently outperforming all of its individual component models. Among several choices of ensemble methods we found that the most influential and best choice was to use a median average of models instead of using the mean, regardless of methods of weighting component forecast models.

    Conclusions:

    Our results support the use of combining forecasts from individual models into an ensemble in order to improve predictive performance across epidemiological targets and populations during infectious disease epidemics. Our findings further suggest that median ensemble methods yield better predictive performance more than ones based on means. Our findings also highlight that forecast consumers should place more weight on incident death forecasts than incident case forecasts at forecast horizons greater than 2 weeks.

    Funding:

    AA, BH, BL, LWa, MMa, PP, SV funded by National Institutes of Health (NIH) Grant 1R01GM109718, NSF BIG DATA Grant IIS-1633028, NSF Grant No.: OAC-1916805, NSF Expeditions in Computing Grant CCF-1918656, CCF-1917819, NSF RAPID CNS-2028004, NSF RAPID OAC-2027541, US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 75D30119C05935, a grant from Google, University of Virginia Strategic Investment Fund award number SIF160, Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) under Contract No. HDTRA1-19-D-0007, and respectively Virginia Dept of Health Grant VDH-21-501-0141, VDH-21-501-0143, VDH-21-501-0147, VDH-21-501-0145, VDH-21-501-0146, VDH-21-501-0142, VDH-21-501-0148. AF, AMa, GL funded by SMIGE - Modelli statistici inferenziali per governare l'epidemia, FISR 2020-Covid-19 I Fase, FISR2020IP-00156, Codice Progetto: PRJ-0695. AM, BK, FD, FR, JK, JN, JZ, KN, MG, MR, MS, RB funded by Ministry of Science and Higher Education of Poland with grant 28/WFSN/2021 to the University of Warsaw. BRe, CPe, JLAz funded by Ministerio de Sanidad/ISCIII. BT, PG funded by PERISCOPE European H2020 project, contract number 101016233. CP, DL, EA, MC, SA funded by European Commission - Directorate-General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology through the contract LC-01485746, and Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovacion y Universidades and FEDER, with the project PGC2018-095456-B-I00. DE., MGu funded by Spanish Ministry of Health / REACT-UE (FEDER). DO, GF, IMi, LC funded by Laboratory Directed Research and Development program of Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) under project number 20200700ER. DS, ELR, GG, NGR, NW, YW funded by National Institutes of General Medical Sciences (R35GM119582; the content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of NIGMS or the National Institutes of Health). FB, FP funded by InPresa, Lombardy Region, Italy. HG, KS funded by European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control. IV funded by Agencia de Qualitat i Avaluacio Sanitaries de Catalunya (AQuAS) through contract 2021-021OE. JDe, SMo, VP funded by Netzwerk Universitatsmedizin (NUM) project egePan (01KX2021). JPB, SH, TH funded by Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF; grant 05M18SIA). KH, MSc, YKh funded by Project SaxoCOV, funded by the German Free State of Saxony. Presentation of data, model results and simulations also funded by the NFDI4Health Task Force COVID-19 (https://www.nfdi4health.de/task-force-covid-19-2) within the framework of a DFG-project (LO-342/17-1). LP, VE funded by Mathematical and Statistical modelling project (MUNI/A/1615/2020), Online platform for real-time monitoring, analysis and management of epidemic situations (MUNI/11/02202001/2020); VE also supported by RECETOX research infrastructure (Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic: LM2018121), the CETOCOEN EXCELLENCE (CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/17-043/0009632), RECETOX RI project (CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/16-013/0001761). NIB funded by Health Protection Research Unit (grant code NIHR200908). SAb, SF funded by Wellcome Trust (210758/Z/18/Z).