ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2021
Challenges in control of COVID-19: short doubling time and long delay to effect of interventions.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 92 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
92 citing papers in PubMed, 18 citations in OpenAlex.
- Recommendations for the analysis of leading indicators in epidemic surveillance.PLOS digital health · 2026Review
- A modeling study on the critical sensitivity of epidemic peaks and final size to marginal changes in non-pharmaceutical intervention efficacy.BMC public health · 2026Article
- Estimating COVID-19 incidence and prevalence using lateral flow tests in England and Scotland, 2023-2024.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Addressing model discrepancy in a clinical model of the oxygen dissociation curve.Philosophical transactions. Series A, Mathematical, physical, and engineering sciences · 2025Article
- The Batalogue: an overview of betacoronaviruses with future pandemic potential.FEMS microbiology reviews · 2025Review
- The utility of infectious disease modelling in informing decisions for outbreak response: A scoping review.PLOS global public health · 2025Article
- Time-varying reproduction number estimation: fusing compartmental models with generalized additive models.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2025Article
- Epidemiological and phylogenetic analyses of public SARS-CoV-2 data from Malawi.PLOS global public health · 2025Article
- rtestim: Time-varying reproduction number estimation with trend filtering.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- In Silico Comparative Analysis of Ivermectin and Nirmatrelvir Inhibitors Interacting with the SARS-CoV-2 Main Protease.Biomolecules · 2024Article
- Article
- How robust are estimates of key parameters in standard viral dynamic models?PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- Detecting changes in generation and serial intervals under varying pathogen biology, contact patterns and outbreak response.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- Basic Reproduction Number (R0), Doubling Time, and Daily Growth Rate of the COVID-19 Epidemic: An Echological Study.Archives of academic emergency medicine · 2024Article
- Modelling disease mitigation at mass gatherings: A case study of COVID-19 at the 2022 FIFA World Cup.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- Estimating time-dependent contact: a multi-strain epidemiological model of SARS-CoV-2 on the island of Ireland.Global epidemiology · 2023Article
- Angular reproduction numbers improve estimates of transmissibility when disease generation times are misspecified or time-varying.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Nowcasting the 2022 mpox outbreak in England.PLoS computational biology · 2023Article
- Interactive SARS-CoV-2 dashboard for real-time geospatial visualisation of sewage and clinical surveillance data from Dhaka, Bangladesh: a tool for public health situational awareness.BMJ global health · 2023Article
- Effectiveness of BNT162b2 COVID-19 vaccination in prevention of hospitalisations and severe disease in adults with SARS-CoV-2 Delta (B.1.617.2) and Omicron (B.1.1.529) variant between June 2021 and July 2022: A prospective test negative case-control study.The Lancet regional health. Europe · 2023Article
32 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
11 authors at 5 institutions in 4 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Early assessments of the growth rate of COVID-19 were subject to significant uncertainty, as expected with limited data and difficulties in case ascertainment, but as cases were recorded in multiple countries, more robust inferences could be made. Using multiple countries, data streams and methods, we estimated that, when unconstrained, European COVID-19 confirmed cases doubled on average every 3 days (range 2.2-4.3 days) and Italian hospital and intensive care unit admissions every 2-3 days; values that are significantly lower than the 5-7 days dominating the early published literature. Furthermore, we showed that the impact of physical distancing interventions was typically not seen until at least 9 days after implementation, during which time confirmed cases could grow eightfold. We argue that such temporal patterns are more critical than precise estimates of the time-insensitive basic reproduction number
Indexed as
Identifiers
What Socratic holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the Socratic graph.