In the epidemiology of infectious diseases, the serial interval refers to the time interval between successive cases or case generations ("infector-infectee pairs") in an infection chain. The serial interval can be used to describe the temporal sequence of case generations very well. This epidemiological parameter is also used to calculate the reproduction number (Reff ). At the time of analysis (07/04/2020), 312 source-case-following-case pairs with reliable information on disease onset are available. From each of these pairs, the time between days of disease onset is calculated and its empirical distribution is presented.

Lukas Richter, Daniela Schmid, Ali Chakeri, Sabine Maritschnik, Sabine Pfeiffer, Department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology & Surveillance, AGES Ernst Stadlober, Institute of Statistics, Graz University of Technology