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Volume 11, Number 8—August 2005
Research

Modeling Control Strategies of Respiratory Pathogens

Babak Pourbohloul*1Comments to Author , Lauren Ancel Meyers†‡1, Danuta M. Skowronski*, Mel Krajden*, David M. Patrick*, and Robert C. Brunham*
Author affiliations: *University of British Columbia Centre for Disease Control, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada; †University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas, USA; ‡Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA

Main Article

Figure 3

Comparing the effect of face masks for the general public and healthcare workers (HCWs). Mask efficiency is the percent reduction in transmissibility to or from a person correctly using a mask. Compliance is the fraction of the population adopting the intervention. Results are for a mildly contagious disease with a transmissibility T = 0.075 and a moderately contagious disease with a transmissibility T = 0.245. The equivalent basic reproductive number for these diseases are R0 = 1.545 and R0 = 5

Figure 3. . Comparing the effect of face masks for the general public and healthcare workers (HCWs). Mask efficiency is the percent reduction in transmissibility to or from a person correctly using a mask. Compliance is the fraction of the population adopting the intervention. Results are for a mildly contagious disease with a transmissibility T = 0.075 and a moderately contagious disease with a transmissibility T = 0.245. The equivalent basic reproductive number for these diseases are R0 = 1.545 and R0 = 5.047, respectively. Without intervention, both of these diseases have T above the epidemic threshold for the community (Tc = 0.048) and thus may ignite a large-scale epidemic. The probabilities that such epidemics will occur (without intervention) are Sprob = 0.50 and Sprob = 0.97, respectively. Some interventions may not bring T below the epidemic threshold and thus only reduce the probability of an epidemic (gray boxes), while others succeed in containing transmission to a small outbreak (white boxes). Gray boxes give the probability of an epidemic, and white boxes give the expected size of an outbreak. Outbreak size may not be an integer since s is an average taken from all possible outbreaks in the community.

Main Article

1These authors contributed equally to this work.

2For the purposes of this manuscript, "airborne" refers to respiratory pathogens that are spread through respiratory secretions and can be either airborne, such as tuberculosis, or dropletborne, such as SARS.

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