Fig. 2.

The illustration diagram of the growth models fitting framework. The (solid and dashed) orange lines are the theoretical growth curves from the simple nonlinear growth models, i.e. the Richards, logistic, Gompertz, or Weibull models. The blue dots are the reported cumulative (cum.) number of cases. The blue shading area represents the period with epidemic reported, which is used for the model fitting in corresponds to the non-shaded area in Figure 1. The intrinsic growth rate is the γ in Eqn (1), which is estimated from the fitted growth models and used for R estimation.