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

is the (which was not peer-reviewed) The copyright holder for this preprint . https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.03.19.20038729 doi: medRxiv preprint While we have no reason to suspect that our hypothetical error rates and assumed health 272 care seeking behavioral functions reflect the reality of any of these three pandemics, they 273 are clearly within realistic ranges and therefore demonstrate how dramatic the impact of 274 even small differences in diagnostic sensitivity (whether due to changes in laboratory 275 practice or to patient-or physician-driven behavior) can be on epidemiological estimates 276 on which we base our public health strategies and policies. significantly before any actual circulation was detected (Fig. 4a) (Fig. 4b) . Of potential note, if we restrict the window for curve fitting to 294 . 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.