Large-scale Lassa fever outbreaks in Nigeria: quantifying the association between disease reproduction number and local rainfall

Shi Zhao; Salihu S. Musa; Hao Fu; Daihai He; Jing Qin

On the one hand, our findings suggest the existence of an association between rainfall and LASV transmissibility, which could be affected by the population dynamics of rodents [13] . On the other hand, the positive relation between rainfall and R indicates that rainfall, particularly in states with a high LF risk, can be used as a warning signal for LF epidemics. The modeling framework in this study can be easily extended to other infectious diseases. Table 1 . The summary table of the model estimations. Population numbers are summarized in units of one million. The "improvement" is the goodness-of-fit estimate, i.e., the partial Rsquared, from the baseline AR(2) model. The "weight" is the AIC-weight of the selected model, which is used for calculating the model-averaged estimates. The "NA" means a summary term that is not applicable to a certain model. The notation "-" means that the model cannot achieve a converging fitting outcome. The model-averaged estimates in each region are highlighted in gray. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not peer-reviewed) is the . https://doi.org/10.1101/602706 doi: bioRxiv preprint