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Estimating R0 From Early Exponential Growth: Parallels Between 1918 Influenza And 2020 Sars-Cov-2 Pandemics, Grant Foster, Bret D. Elderd, Robert L. Richards, Tad Dallas

Faculty Publications

The large spatial scale, geographical overlap, and similarities in transmission mode between the 1918 H1N1 influenza and 2020 SARS-CoV-2 pandemics together provide a novel opportunity to investigate relationships between transmission of two different diseases in the same location. To this end, we use initial exponential growth rates in a Bayesian hierarchical framework to estimate the basic reproductive number, R₀, of both disease outbreaks in a common set of 43 cities in the United States. By leveraging multiple epidemic time series across a large spatial area, we are able to better characterize the variation in R₀ across the …