The ongoing outbreak of the novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) pneumonia in Wuhan, China and other regions remains a major public health concern. We thank Dhungana for comments to our study, Zhao et al. (2020), recently published in the International Journal of Infectious Diseases. The estimates on the basic reproduction number, R0, were carried out early in the outbreak as of January 22, 2020, when the surveillance data and the knowledge of the key epidemiological features of 2019-nCoV were limited.