Probabilistic approximation of effective reproduction number of COVID-19 using daily death statistics.

The effective reproduction number () which signifies the number of secondary cases infected by one infectious individual, is an important measure of the spread of an infectious disease. Due to the dynamics of COVID-19 where many infected people are not showing symptoms or showing mild symptoms, and where different countries are employing different testing strategies, it is quite difficult to calculate the , while the pandemic is still widespread. This paper presents a probabilistic methodology to evaluate the effective reproduction number by considering only the daily death statistics of a given country.