Improving early epidemiological assessment of emerging Aedes-transmitted epidemics using historical data

Julien Riou; Chiara Poletto; Pierre-Yves Boëlle

Also, using informative priors to make up for the lack of information during the early stages of an epidemic has been done before. For instance, a priori information from the ZIKV epidemics in French Polynesia has been used to support the early forecasts of health-care requirements for the ZIKV epidemic in Martinique [38] . In this case, however, authors concluded that a prior built from an epidemic in a dierent location resulted in inaccurate predictions at the early stage. We found a similar result in a sensitivity analysis: the direct use of information from ZIKV in French Polynesia, or alternatively the direct use of information from CHIKV in the French West Indies, without adjusting for ZIKV, leads to poor overall forecasting quality compared to the L prior considered here (supplementary appendix).