Projections of epidemic transmission and estimation of vaccination impact during an ongoing Ebola virus disease outbreak in Northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo, as of Feb. 25, 2019

Worden, Lee; Wannier, Rae; Hoff, Nicole A.; Musene, Kamy; Selo, Bernice; Mossoko, Mathias; Okitolonda-Wemakoy, Emile; Muyembe Tamfum, Jean Jacques; Rutherford, George W.; Lietman, Thomas M.; Rimoin, Anne W.; Porco, Travis C.; Kelly, J. Daniel

Transmission rates estimated by day in these outbreaks tend to decline from initially high to eventually low values, though they may display substantial fluctuations. This "quenching" of transmission may be driven by formal interventions such as quarantine, or by informal changes in individuals' behavior in response to the disease or by depletion of uninfected contacts of infective individuals, or by other causes. We incorporated this pattern into our model by estimating an initial reproduction number R initial and quenching rate Ï„ for each outbreak by fitting an exponentially quenched curve to the outbreak's estimates of R by day d (S2 Fig) , and used these pairs of parameters, one from each past outbreak, to construct a joint distribution of initial reproduction numbers and quenching rates for outbreak simulation.