Speed and strength of an epidemic intervention

Jonathan Dushoff; Sang Woo Park

The infection kernel is shown in (Fig. 2A) for our baseline value of p early = 0.23. We assume that the initial speed of the epidemic is r = 0.452 year −1 (Fig. 2B) , and ask what value 5 . CC-BY-ND 4.0 International license author/funder. It is made available under a The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not peer-reviewed) is the . https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.03.02.974048 doi: bioRxiv preprint Year HIV prevalence B q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q The infection kernel of the HIV is approximated using a sum of two gamma distributions. We assume that the baseline proportion of early transmission is 23% (Hayes and White, 2006) . (B) Time series of HIV prevalence in pregnant women in South Africa, 1990 -2010 (Barron et al., 2013 . The initial exponential growth rate of the HIV is estimated by fitting a straight line to log-prevalence (1990 -1997) of R 0 would produce this rate of growth. When transmission is fast, (i.e., when p early is large), individuals don't need to transmit as much to achieve this speed, so the estimated value of R 0 decreases (Fig. 2C) . Therefore, as p early gets smaller, we expect stronger intervention to be required in order to control the disease.