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Characterizing Outbreak Trajectories and the Effective Reproduction Number

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Quantitative Methods for Investigating Infectious Disease Outbreaks

Part of the book series: Texts in Applied Mathematics ((TAM,volume 70))

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Abstract

Emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases pose major challenges to public health worldwide. Fortunately mathematical and statistical inference and simulation approaches are part of the toolkit for guiding prevention and response plans. As the recent 2013–2016 Ebola epidemic exemplified, an unfolding infectious disease outbreak often forces public health officials to put in place control policies in the context of limited data about the outbreak and in a changing environment where multiple factors positively or negatively impact local disease transmission. Hence, the development of public health policies could benefit from mathematically rigorous and computationally efficient approaches that comprehensively assimilate data and model uncertainty in real time in order to (1) estimate transmission rates, (2) assess the impact of control interventions (vaccination campaigns, behavior changes), (3) test hypotheses relating to transmission mechanisms, (4) evaluate how behavior changes affect transmission dynamics, (5) optimize the impact of control strategies, and (6) generate forecasts to guide interventions in the short and long terms.

Electronic Supplementary Material The online version of this chapter (https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21923-9_8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Infectious Diseases Prevention and Control Branch, Public Health Agency of Canada, Ottawa, ON, Canada

    Ping Yan

  2. Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science, Faculty of Mathematics, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    Ping Yan

  3. School of Public Health, Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Gerardo Chowell

Authors
  1. Ping Yan
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  2. Gerardo Chowell
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Yan, P., Chowell, G. (2019). Characterizing Outbreak Trajectories and the Effective Reproduction Number. In: Quantitative Methods for Investigating Infectious Disease Outbreaks. Texts in Applied Mathematics, vol 70. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21923-9_8

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