Early Real-Time Estimation of the Basic Reproduction Number of Emerging Infectious Diseases

When an infectious disease strikes a population, the number of newly reported cases is often the only available information during the early stages of the outbreak. An important goal of early outbreak analysis is to obtain a reliable estimate for the basic reproduction number, R0. Over the past few years, infectious disease epidemic processes have gained attention from the physics community. Much of the work to date, however, has focused on the …