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When analysing new emerging infectious disease outbreaks one typically has observational data over a limited period of time and several parameters to estimate, such as growth rate, R0, serial or generation interval distribution, latent and…
In 2014, a major epidemic of human Ebola virus disease emerged in West Africa, where human-to-human transmission has now been been sustained for greater than 10 months. In the summer of 2014, there was great uncertainty about the answers to…
The Ebola virus in West Africa has infected almost 30,000 and killed over 11,000 people. Recent models of Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) have often made assumptions about how the disease spreads, such as uniform transmissibility and homogeneous…
Multiple epidemiological models have been proposed to predict the spread of Ebola in West Africa. These models include consideration of counter-measures meant to slow and, eventually, stop the spread of the disease. Here, we examine one…
Recent outbreaks of monkeypox and Ebola, and worrying waves of COVID-19, influenza and respiratory syncytial virus, have all led to a sharp increase in the use of epidemiological models to estimate key epidemiological parameters. The…
An Ebola outbreak of unparalleled size is currently affecting several countries in West Africa, and international efforts to control the outbreak are underway. However, the efficacy of these interventions, and their likely impact on an…
Dynamic models - often deterministic in nature - were used to estimate the basic reproductive number, R_0, of the 2014-5 Ebola virus disease (EVD) epidemic outbreak in West Africa. Estimates of R_0 were then used to project the likelihood…
A better characterization of the early growth dynamics of an epidemic is needed to dissect the important drivers of disease transmission. We introduce a 2-parameter generalized-growth model to characterize the ascending phase of an outbreak…
The Ebola epidemic in West Africa is the largest ever recorded, with over 27,000 cases and 11,000 deaths as of June 2015. The public health response was challenged by difficulties with disease surveillance, which impacted subsequent…
The most recent Ebola outbreak in West Africa highlighted critical weaknesses in the medical infrastructure of the affected countries, including effective diagnostics tools, sufficient isolation wards, and enough medical personnel. Here, we…
Background: The 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa was the largest on record, resulting in over 25,000 total infections and 15,000 total deaths. Mathematical modeling can be used to investigate the mechanisms driving transmission during…
The emergence of novel infectious agents presents challenges to statistical models of disease transmission. These challenges arise from limited, poor-quality data and an incomplete understanding of the agent. Moreover, outbreaks manifest…
We present a method for estimating epidemic parameters in network-based stochastic epidemic models when the total number of infections is assumed to be small. We illustrate the method by reanalyzing the data from the 2014 Democratic…
Towards the end of an infectious disease outbreak, when a period has elapsed without new case notifications, a key question for public health policy makers is whether the outbreak can be declared over. This requires the benefits of a…
Infectious disease outbreaks recapitulate biology: they emerge from the multi-level interaction of hosts, pathogens, and their shared environment. As a result, predicting when, where, and how far diseases will spread requires a complex…
The Ebola virus is currently one of the most virulent pathogens for humans. The latest major outbreak occurred in Guinea, Sierra Leonne and Liberia in 2014. With the aim of understanding the spread of infection in the affected countries, it…
The data for the Ebola outbreak that occurred in 2014-2016 in three countries of West Africa are analysed within a common framework. The analysis is made using the results of an agent based Susceptible-Infected-Removed (SIR) model on a…
The 2014 Ebola outbreak in west Africa raised many questions about the control of infectious disease in an increasingly connected global society. Limited availability of contact information made contact tracing difficult or impractical in…
Epidemic models often reflect characteristic features of infectious spreading processes by coupled non-linear differential equations considering different states of health (such as Susceptible, Infected, or Recovered). This compartmental…
The current survey paper concerns stochastic mathematical models for the spread of infectious diseases. It starts with the simplest setting of a homogeneous population in which a transmittable disease spreads during a short outbreak.…