Related papers: Estimating and interpreting secondary attack risk:…
The Secondary Attack Rate (SAR) is a measure of how infectious a communicable disease is, and is often estimated based on studies of disease transmission in households. The Chain Binomial model is a simple model for disease outbreaks, and…
Households represent a key unit of interest in infectious disease epidemiology, in both empirical studies and mathematical modelling. The within-household transmission potential of a disease is often summarised by a secondary attack ratio…
Many important questions in infectious disease epidemiology involve the effects of covariates (e.g., age or vaccination status) on infectiousness and susceptibility, which can be measured in studies of transmission in households or other…
This paper considers a stochastic SIR (susceptible$\to$infective$\to$removed) epidemic model in which individuals may make infectious contacts in two ways, both within `households' (which for ease of exposition are assumed to have equal…
Many disease models focus on characterizing the underlying transmission mechanism but make simple, possibly naive assumptions about how infections are reported. In this note, we use a simple deterministic Susceptible-Infected-Removed (SIR)…
The generation interval is the time between the infection time of an infected person and the infection time of his or her infector. Probability density functions for generation intervals have been an important input for epidemic models and…
In this work, the spread of a contagious disease on a society where the individuals may take precautions is modeled. The primary assumption is that the infected individuals transmit the infection to the susceptible members of the community…
In the face of an infectious disease, a key epidemiological measure is the basic reproduction number, which quantifies the average secondary infections caused by a single case in a susceptible population. In practice, the effective…
In this paper, we study the spread of a classical SIR process on a two-layer random network, where the first layer represents the households, while the second layer models the contacts outside the households by a random scale-free graph. We…
This paper is concerned with SIR (susceptible $\to$ infected $\to$ removed) household epidemic models in which the infection response may be either mild or severe, with the type of response also affecting the infectiousness of an…
Background: A wide range of diseases show some degree of clustering in families; family history is therefore an important aspect for clinicians when making risk predictions. Familial aggregation is often quantified in terms of a familial…
An epidemic model where disease transmission can occur either through global contacts or through local, nearest neighbor interactions is considered. The classical SIR--model describing the global interactions is extended by adding…
We consider a continuous-time Markov chain model of SIR disease dynamics with two levels of mixing. For this so-called stochastic households model, we provide two methods for inferring the model parameters---governing within-household…
In epidemiological or demographic studies, with variable age at onset, a typical quantity of interest is the incidence of a disease (for example the cancer incidence). In these studies, the individuals are usually highly heterogeneous in…
This paper introduces semiparametric relative-risk regression models for infectious disease data based on contact intervals, where the contact interval from person i to person j is the time between the onset of infectiousness in i and…
The attributable risk, often called the population attributable risk, is in many epidemiological contexts a more relevant measure of exposure-disease association than the excess risk, relative risk, or odds ratio. When estimating…
HIV transmission within serodiscordant couples remains a significant public health challenge, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. Estimating the rate of such infection, alongside the rates of introduction of infection from outside the…
The viral load is known to be a chief predictor of the risk of transmission of infectious diseases. In this work, we investigate the role of the individuals' viral load in the disease transmission by proposing a new…
Super-spreading events for infectious diseases occur when some infected individuals infect more than the average number of secondary cases. Several super-spreading individuals have been identified for the 2003 outbreak of severe acute…
In Part 1, we introduced a stochastic model of an infectious disease, based on the BDI (birth and death with immigration) process. We showed that random processes defined by this model can capture the essence of the stochastic, often…