Emerging Infectious Disease ISSN: 1080-6059

Model Parameters and Outbreak Control for SARS

Gerardo Chowell*†

, Carlos Castillo-Chavez‡¹, Paul W. Fenimore*, Christopher M. Kribs-Zaleta§, Leon Arriola*, and James M. Hyman*

Author affiliations: *Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, New Mexico, USA; †Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA; ‡Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, USA; §University of Texas at Arlington, Arlington, Texas, USA

Main Article

Figure 1

Histograms of the six distributed parameters appearing in equation 1 with sample size 105. The transmission rate was assumed to be exponentially distributed with mean 0.25, our estimated transmission rate in Hong Kong. Here l is assumed to have a beta distribution (l ~ β [1,2]). Alternative distributions for l were also used as described in the text. All other distributions were taken from reference 3.

Figure 1. . Histograms of the six distributed parameters appearing in equation 1 with sample size 10⁵. The transmission rate was assumed to be exponentially distributed with mean 0.25, our estimated transmission rate in Hong Kong. Here l is assumed to have a beta distribution (l ~ β [1,2]). Alternative distributions for l were also used as described in the text. All other distributions were taken from reference 3.

Main Article

¹At the time this work was carried out, Dr. Castillo-Chavez was on sabbatical at Los Alamos National Laboratory and faculty of Cornell University.

²Recall that l = 0 corresponds to complete isolation, whereas l = 1 means no effective isolation occurs. Hence, a decrease in l means an increase in the effective isolation of the infected persons.

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