Elsevier has created a COVID-19 resource centre with free information in English and Mandarin on the novel coronavirus COVID-19. The COVID-19 resource centre is hosted on Elsevier Connect, the company's public news and information website. Elsevier hereby grants permission to make all its COVID-19-related research that is available on the COVID-19 resource centre-including this research content-immediately available in PubMed Central and other publicly funded repositories, such as the WHO COVID database with rights for unrestricted research re-use and analyses in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for free by Elsevier for as long as the COVID-19 resource centre remains active.

In the absence of a consensus protocol to slow down the spread of SARS-CoV-2, policymakers need real-time indicators to support decisions in public health matters. The Effective Reproduction Number (Rt) represents the number of secondary infections generated per each case and can be dramatically modified by applying effective interventions. However, current methodologies to calculate Rt from data remain somewhat cumbersome, thus raising a barrier between its timely calculation and application by policymakers. In this work, we provide a simple mathematical formulation for obtaining the effective reproduction number in real-time using only and directly daily official case reports, obtained by modifying the equations describing the viral spread. We numerically explore the accuracy and limitations of the proposed methodology, which was demonstrated to provide accurate, timely, and intuitive results. We illustrate the use of our methodology to study the evolution of the pandemic in different iconic countries, and to assess the efficacy and promptness of different public health interventions.

No abstract