Intrinsic and realized generation times in infectious diseases outbreaks

18th April 2023 4:00pm

Speaker

Alfredo De Bellis

Abstract

The generation time (GT) plays a key role in epidemiological surveillance. However, estimating it can be very tricky, as the infection episodes remain unobserved. Even in the rare cases with a known transmission chain (who infected whom), what we measure is the so-called “realized” GT, which strongly depends on the structure of the sub-population considered. The realized GT, though, can be a biased estimator for the “intrinsic” one (i.e., the GT we would observe in unstructured populations), that is a more appropriate quantity to consider for modeling purposes or/and to inform public health decisions. Therefore, being able to estimate the intrinsic GT is fundamental in order to put in place efficient interventions.

In the first part of this talk, I will give an overview of the realized and intrinsic GT from a mathematical point of view. Then, I will discuss our works on the cases of the SARS-CoV-2 variants Alpha, Delta and Omicron in household transmission settings, where we provide a Bayesian inference model for transmission chain reconstruction and estimate the intrinsic GT for each variant.

Where

Seminar Room 1 – Povo0, Via Sommarive 14