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Characterizing The Reproduction Number Of Epidemics With Early Subexponential Growth Dynamics., Gerardo Chowell, Cécile Viboud, Lone Simonsen, Seyed M Moghadas

Global Health Faculty Publications

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 generally assume exponential growth in case incidence in the first few disease generations, before susceptible depletion sets in. In reality, outbreaks can display subexponential (i.e. polynomial) growth in the first few disease generations, owing to clustering in contact patterns, spatial effects, inhomogeneous mixing, reactive behaviour changes or other mechanisms. Here, we introduce the generalized growth model to characterize the early growth profile of outbreaks and estimate …