Estimation of the Distribution of the Individual Reproduction Number: The Case of the COVID-19 Pandemic

01/20/2021
by   Alexander Braumann, et al.
0

We investigate the problem of estimating the distribution of the individual reproduction number governing the COVID-19 pandemic. Under the assumption that this random variable follows a Negative Binomial distribution, we focus on constructing estimators of the parameters of this distribution using reported infection data and taking into account issues like under-reporting or the time behavior of the infection and of the reporting processes. To this end, we extract information from regionally dissaggregated data reported by German health authorities, in order to estimate not only the mean but also the variance of the distribution of the individual reproduction number. In contrast to the mean, the latter parameter also depends on the unknown under-reporting rate of the pandemic. The estimates obtained allow not only for a better understanding of the time-varying behavior of the expected value of the individual reproduction number but also of its dispersion, for the construction of bootstrap confidence intervals and for a discussion of the implications of different policy interventions. Our methodological investigations are accompanied by an empirical study of the development of the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany, which shows a strong overdispersion of the individual reproduction number.

READ FULL TEXT

page 1

page 2

page 3

page 4

research
02/09/2022

Flexible Bayesian Nowcasting with application to COVID-19 fatalities in Sweden

The real-time analysis of infectious disease surveillance data, e.g. tim...
research
11/04/2020

Estimating the evolution of effective infection fatality rates during the course of the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany

Several seroprevalence studies have been or are currently conducted in o...
research
04/13/2020

Estimation of time-varying reproduction numbers underlying epidemiological processes: a new statistical tool for the COVID-19 pandemic

The coronavirus pandemic has rapidly evolved into an unprecedented crisi...
research
08/22/2021

Application of Executive Information System for COVID-19 Reporting System and Management: An Example from DKI Jakarta, Indonesia

SARS CoV-2 infection and transmission are problematic in developing coun...
research
03/07/2022

A modelling framework for the analysis of the transmission of SARS-CoV2

Action plans against the current SARS-CoV-2 pandemic have been implement...

Please sign up or login with your details

Forgot password? Click here to reset