Waterborne, abiotic and other indirectly transmitted (W.A.I.T.) infections are defined by the dynamics of free-living pathogens and environmental reservoirs

Miles D. Miller-Dickson; Victor A. Meszaros; Francis Baffour-Awuah; Salvador Almagro-Moreno; C. Brandon Ogbunugafor

Having constructed and elaborated on the details of the HCV WAIT model, we now explore how parameters related to the environment (in this case, those framing the population of infected needles) influence the R 0 . We directly measured the influence of parameters on the R 0 by considering the effect of modifying the parameters. The value of R 0 was calculated using established methods [34] , [35] , and is also found to conform to a geometric mean of two other R 0 -like quantities, just as in our adapted SIR model in section II. The full calculation and its presentation as a geometric mean is outlined in the Supplemental Appendix.