A practical generation interval-based approach to inferring the strength of epidemics from their speed

Sang Woo Park; David Champredon; Joshua S. Weitz; Jonathan Dushoff

We generated a pseudo-realistic generation-interval distribution for Ebola virus disease (EVD) using information from [7] and a lognormal assumption for both the incubation and infectious periods. In contrast to gamma distributed incubation and infectious periods assumed by [7] , we used a lognormal assumption for our components because it is straightforward and should provide a challenging test of our gamma approximation (see Appendix for results using gamma components). We used the reported standard deviation for the infectious period, and chose the standard deviation for the incubation period to match the reported coefficient of variation for the serial interval distribution, since this value is available and is expected to be similar to the generation interval distribution for EVD [7] .