Are epidemic growth rates more informative than reproduction numbers?
Are epidemic growth rates more informative than reproduction numbers?
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DOI:
10.1111/rssa.12867
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发表时间:
2022-05-26
影响因子:
2
通讯作者:
Donnelly, Christl A.
中科院分区:
文献类型:
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作者:
Parag, Kris, V;Thompson, Robin N.;Donnelly, Christl A.
The Summary statistics, often derived from simplified models of epidemic spread, inform public health policy in real time. The instantaneous reproduction number, R-t, is predominant among these statistics, measuring the average ability of an infection to multiply. However, R-t encodes no temporal information and is sensitive to modelling assumptions. Consequently, some have proposed the epidemic growth rate, r(t), that is, the rate of change of the log-transformed case incidence, as a more temporally meaningful and model-agnostic policy guide. We examine this assertion, identifying if and when estimates of r(t) are more informative than those of R-t. We assess their relative strengths both for learning about pathogen transmission mechanisms and for guiding public health interventions in real time.