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Updated: Nov 20, 2025

Monitoring Influenza Virus Survival Outside the Host Using Real-Time Cell Analysis
Published on: February 20, 2021
Serial Interval and Generation Interval for Imported and Local Infectors, Respectively, Estimated Using Reported
Menghui Li1,2, Kai Liu3, Yukun Song4
1Beijing Institute of Science and Technology Information, Beijing, China.
Abstract:
The emerging virus, COVID-19, has caused a massive outbreak worldwide. Based on the publicly available contact-tracing data, we identified 509 transmission chains from 20 provinces in China and estimated the serial interval (SI) and generation interval (GI) of COVID-19 in China. Inspired by different possible values of the time-varying reproduction number for the imported cases and the local cases in China, we divided all transmission events into three subsets: imported (the zeroth generation) infecting 1st-generation locals, 1st-generation locals infecting 2nd-generation locals, and other transmissions among 2+. The corresponding SI (GI) is respectively denoted as ( ), ( ), and ( ). A Bayesian approach with doubly interval-censored likelihood is employed to fit the distribution function of the SI and GI. It was found that the estimated , , , and , , . Thus, overall both SI and GI decrease when generation increases.
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