Since the reproduction number reflects only the growth rate during the early stages of the epidemic, estimating R0 is sensitive to the time period chosen for fitting the model to the data.
The massive human population declines due to plague epidemics (estimated at about 40% during the Black Death of 1347 1352 and 20% during the Great Plague of 1665 1666), from which Europe recovered only four centuries later, may be one cause of leprosy's decline.
Serological studies following the 1988 epidemic gave estimates for the proportion of seals that might have escaped infection.
For the case of an exponentially growing epidemic, the estimates of the individual and household reproduction numbers, R and R * respectively, are shown in Figure 3, along with the estimate of the number of people one person infects outside their household, RG.
Because doubling times change substantially over the course of an epidemic, current estimates should not be used to extrapolate into the future.
In terms of policy development and evaluation during the epidemic, obtaining estimates of the temporal trends in the reproduction number relating to as recent a time as possible would be critical.
The daily new cases and cumulative epidemic curves estimated by the proposed method have a lower absolute relative bias than the values estimated solely based on the available daily-confirmed cases.
The Ebola epidemic is estimated to have killed about a third of the population tens of thousands in the wild.
South Africa is gripped by the world's largest AIDS epidemic: an estimated 5m people, some 11% of the population, are infected with HIV.
