Early Real-time Estimation of Infectious Disease Reproduction Number

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new real-time method for estimating the basic reproduction number of infectious diseases early in an outbreak, accounting for variable infectious periods and contact network heterogeneity.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel analytical framework for early real-time estimation of R0 that incorporates infectious period variability and network heterogeneity.

Findings

Reliable early estimates of R0 are achievable with the proposed method.

The method outperforms existing approaches in early outbreak stages.

Validation through numerical simulations confirms the framework's effectiveness.

Abstract

When an infectious disease strikes a population, the number of newly reported cases is often the only available information that one can obtain during early stages of the outbreak. An important goal of early outbreak analysis is to obtain a reliable estimate for the basic reproduction number, $R_{0}$, from the limited information available. We present a novel method that enables us to make a reliable real-time estimate of the reproduction number at a much earlier stage compared to other available methods. Our method takes into account the possibility that a disease has a wide distribution of infectious period and that the degree distribution of the contact network is heterogeneous. We validate our analytical framework with numerical simulations.