Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 SARS-CoV-2 has rapidly spread across the globe since December 2019 (
1). Thus, the virus has demonstrated high infectiousness among susceptible populations. The first reports of human-to-human transmission of the disease were on 19th February 2020, and more than 146,600 laboratory-confirmed cases have been reported until 30th May in Iran due to community transmission (
1).
The basic reproduction number (R0) is an epidemic threshold parameter that indicates the magnitude of infection transmissibility and may allow for prompt initiation of planning and implementation of public health and control measures. Mathematically, it represents the average number of secondary patients in a fully susceptible community at the beginning of an outbreak (
2,
3). For demonstrating the persistence or dying-out of the epidemic, the quantity of R0 is compared with the unit value; these orders are R0 ≥ 1 or R0 < 1, respectively (
3-
5). During the first wave, the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran immediately began to impose restrictions on public gatherings and enhance the testing capacity. Thus, the number of infected people in the susceptible community reduced over time, and the effective reproduction number (Rt), which is defined as the actual average number of secondary cases per principal case when time > 0, could be computed. The R0 values for COVID-19 have been addressed in many countries, as well as Iran (
2,
4-
16). One study applied susceptible-infectious-removed (SIR) compartmental models to estimate R0 in the first 21 days of the epidemic in Iran (
16). Another study used two methods, Generalized Growth model (GGM) and epidemic doubling time. The distribution of serial interval was as a gamma distribution (mean 4.41 ± 3.17 days), and the duration of the study was one month (
7). However, the peak of the epidemic in Iran occurred in the first 40 days of the outbreak, which faded out later (
1). On the other hand, several approaches have been proposed to estimate R0, such as exponential growth (EG) rate, Maximum Likelihood (ML), time-dependent (TD) reproduction number, attack rate (AR), sequential Bayesian (SB) model, gamma-distributed generation time, the final size of the epidemic, and Richard model (
3,
17,
18). The use of these models is dependent on the type of data available. Hence, our aim in this study was to compare five approaches (EG, ML, SB, TD, and AR) to estimate R0 with the same generation time distribution and thus, determine the best fitting method.