Are epidemic growth rates more informative than reproduction numbers?

Journal article

Abstract:: 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, i.e., 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.

Files:: Parag_et_al_2021_Are_epidemic_growth.pdf

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Language:: English
Keywords:: reproduction number

epidemic modelling

infectious disease

situational awareness

growth rate

FFR

COVID-19
Pubs id:: 1174325
Local pid:: pubs:1174325
Deposit date:: 2023-09-09

Copyright holder:: Parag et al.
Rights statement:: © 2021 The Author(s). The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license.
Notes:: This is the preprint version of the article. The final version is available online from Wiley at https://doi.org/10.1111/rssa.12867

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