A quantitative framework to define the end of an outbreak: application to Ebola Virus Disease

Bimandra A Djaafara; Natsuko Imai; Esther Hamblion; Benido Impouma; Christl A Donnelly; Anne Cori

However, these approaches only address some of the aforementioned issues and have other limitations which we discuss later. Hence, further development of quantitative techniques to define the EO is urgently needed. In this study, we developed a simulation-based method to calculate the probability of cases arising in the future after the outcome of the last detected case. We account for factors that influence the estimated probability such as the underlying reproduction number, the reporting rate and the delay between the onset and the outcome of the last detected case, which for simplicity we will refer to as 'the onset-to-outcome delay period'. We tested our method on several EVD outbreak scenarios. Finally, we used the simulation results to propose a new quantitative criterion to define the EO for EVD.