For the MLE analyses, we calculate the estimates of R 0 and the serial interval, assuming the serial interval follows a multinomial with a maximal length of four days [14] . We estimate the parameters under two scenarios. First we consider the first 16 days when the epidemic curve is in exponential growth and 326 cases had been observed. We perform estimation assuming an infinite number of susceptible individuals. Second, we consider the entire epidemic curve and estimate the effective reproductive number R t , by allowing R t to following a four parameter logistic distribution, as shown in [6] . We report the value for R 0 from this analysis. The median of the estimates over the 1000 simulated datasets is shown for each scenario along with the interquartile range of estimates obtained.