Medicine and Health Sciences Commons^™

Testing Modeling Assumptions In The West Africa Ebola Outbreak, Matthew C. Ingram, Keith Burghardt, Christopher Verzijl, Junming Huang, Binyang Song, Marie-Pierre Hasne

Political Science Faculty Scholarship

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 mixing within a population. In this paper, we test whether these assumptions are necessarily correct, and offer simple solutions that may improve disease model accuracy. First, we use data and models of West African migration to show that EVD does not homogeneously mix, but spreads in a predictable manner. Next, we estimate the initial growth rate of EVD within country administrative divisions and …