Author ORCID Identifier
Matthew Ingram: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6904-2178
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
Fall 10-10-2016
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1038/srep34598
Abstract
The Ebola virus in West Africa has infected almost 30,000 and killed over 11,000 people. Recent models of Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) have often made assumptions about how the disease spreads, such as uniform transmissibility and homogeneous mixing within a population. In this paper, we test whether these assumptions are necessarily correct, and offer simple solutions that may improve disease model accuracy. First, we use data and models of West African migration to show that EVD does not homogeneously mix, but spreads in a predictable manner. Next, we estimate the initial growth rate of EVD within country administrative divisions and find that it significantly decreases with population density. Finally, we test whether EVD strains have uniform transmissibility through a novel statistical test, and find that certain strains appear more often than expected by chance.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Ingram, Matthew C.; Burghardt, Keith; Verzijl, Christopher; Huang, Junming; Song, Binyang; and Hasne, Marie-Pierre, "Testing Modeling Assumptions in the West Africa Ebola Outbreak" (2016). Political Science Faculty Scholarship. 2.
https://scholarsarchive.library.albany.edu/rockefeller_pos_scholar/2
Terms of Use
This work is made available under the Scholars Archive Terms of Use.
Comments
This is the publisher's PDF. The version of record can be found here: Burghardt, K., Verzijl, C., Huang, J. et al. Testing Modeling Assumptions in the West Africa Ebola Outbreak. Sci Rep 6, 34598 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/srep34598