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

. When the ratio of the diagnosis tests is non-constant the results are more 324 complicated, but some results are still accessible: without errors in diagnostic tests, a 325 surveillance system can wrongly report no disease incidence while actual case incidence 326 is either increasing or decreasing. Further, with small errors in the diagnostic tests it is 327 possible for a surveillance system to report decreasing incidence while the actual 328 The ability to accurately infer epidemiological rates from outbreak data is critical to a 334 majority of our public health planning efforts. As our models demonstrate, the accuracy 335 of our estimates may be significantly compromised by our implicit assumption that 336 diagnostic error rates and health care seeking behavior remain constant over the course of 337 . 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.