Fear, Access, and the Real-Time Estimation of Etiological Parameters for Outbreaks of Novel Pathogens

Nina H Fefferman; Eric Lofgren; Nianpeng Li; Pieter Blue; David Weber; Abdul-Aziz Yakubu

We begin with a standard Susceptible-Infected-Recovered (SIR) system, however, we 132 will examine both "real" process of actual pathogen spread (denoted by the subscript a), 133 and a "perceived" or "measured" process (denoted by the subscript m). For simplicity 134 sake, we will assume that correct diagnosis and treatment has no bearing on the duration 135 of illness/ recovery time, nor on the rates of transmission from infected to susceptible 136 individuals. Although both of these are obviously false for most outbreaks, they allow us 137 to highlight the processes and methods most relevant to our purpose here and are easily 138 corrected in specific application to particular outbreaks in the future. We therefore 139 . CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license It is made available under a author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.