Related papers: Estimating the effective reproduction number for h…
During an epidemic outbreak, decision makers crucially need accurate and robust tools to monitor the pathogen propagation. The effective reproduction number, defined as the expected number of secondary infections stemming from one…
In the recent COVID-19 pandemic, a wide range of epidemiological modelling approaches have been used to predict the effective reproduction number, R(t), and other COVID-19 related measures such as the daily rate of exponential growth, r(t).…
Early estimates of the transmission potential of emerging and re-emerging infections are increasingly used to inform public health authorities on the level of risk posed by outbreaks. Existing methods to estimate the reproduction number…
Reproduction numbers, like the basic reproduction number $\mathcal{R}_0$, play an important role in the analysis and application of dynamic models, including contagion models and ecological population models. One difficulty in deriving…
In this paper, we introduce a general numerical method to approximate the reproduction numbers of a large class of multi-group, age-structured, population models with a finite age span. To provide complete flexibility in the definition of…
Quantifying the attack ratio of disease is key to epidemiological inference and Public Health planning. For multi-serotype pathogens, however, different levels of serotype-specific immunity make it difficult to assess the population at…
The basic and effective reproduction numbers are widely used metrics for characterizing the dynamics of infectious disease epidemics. However, the interpretation of these numbers is based on the assumption of homogeneous mixing and may not…
The correct evaluation of the reproductive number $R$ for COVID-19 -- which characterizes the average number of secondary cases generated by each typical primary case -- is central in the quantification of the potential scope of the…
We propose a compartmental mathematical model for the spread of the COVID-19 disease, showing its usefulness with respect to the pandemic in Portugal, from the first recorded case in the country till the end of the three states of…
This study introduces a novel epidemiological model that expands upon the Kermack-McKendrick model by incorporating the age of infection and reinfection. By including infection age, we can classify participants, which enables a more…
The basic reproductive number -- $R_0$ -- is one of the most common and most commonly misapplied numbers in public health. Although often used to compare outbreaks and forecast pandemic risk, this single number belies the complexity that…
This paper deals with the problem of estimating variables in nonlinear models for the spread of disease and its application to the COVID-19 epidemic. First unconstrained methods are revisited and they are shown to correspond to the…
This is a pedagogical paper on estimating the number of people that can be infected by one infectious person during an epidemic outbreak, known as the reproduction number. Knowing the number is crucial for developing policy responses. There…
Reproduction numbers are widely used for the estimation and prediction of epidemic spreading processes over networks. However, reproduction numbers do not enable estimation and prediction in individual communities within networks, and they…
The basic reproduction number, $R_0$, is a well-known quantifier of epidemic spread. However, a class of existing methods for estimating $R_0$ from incidence data early in the epidemic can lead to an over-estimation of this quantity. In…
We discuss the generation of various reproduction ratios or numbers that are very useful to monitor an ongoing epidemic like Covid-19 and examine the effects of intervention measures. A detailed SEIR algorithm is described for their…
A major difficulty to estimate $R$ (the effective reproducing number) of COVID-19 is that most cases of COVID-19 infection are mild or asymptomatic, therefore true number of infection is difficult to determine. This paper estimates the…
Accurate estimates of the reproduction ratio are crucial to project infectious disease epidemic evolution and guide public health response. Here, we prove that estimates of the reproduction ratio based on inference from surveillance data…
During infectious disease outbreaks, estimates of time-varying pathogen transmissibility, such as the instantaneous reproduction number R(t) or epidemic growth rate r(t), are used to inform decision-making by public health authorities. For…
The basic reproduction number, $R_0$ is an important and widely used concept in the study of infectious diseases. We briefly review the recent trend of calculating the average of various $R_0$ estimates in systematic reviews aimed at…