Differential contagiousness of respiratory disease across the United States.

Epidemics

Center for Nonlinear Studies, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM 87545, USA; Theoretical Biology and Biophysics Group, Theoretical Division, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM 87545, USA. Electronic address:

Published: December 2023

AI Article Synopsis

  • The basic reproduction number (R) quantifies how contagious a disease is and varies based on pathogen and population characteristics.
  • Using Bayesian inference and a specific modeling approach, researchers estimated region-specific R values for 280 out of 384 metropolitan statistical areas in the US, which represent a large majority of the urban population.
  • The estimated R values for COVID-19 ranged from 1.9 to 7.7, highlighting significant differences in how easily the disease could spread in different urban areas.

Article Abstract

The initial contagiousness of a communicable disease within a given population is quantified by the basic reproduction number, R. This number depends on both pathogen and population properties. On the basis of compartmental models that reproduce Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) surveillance data, we used Bayesian inference and the next-generation matrix approach to estimate region-specific R values for 280 of 384 metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) in the United States (US), which account for 95% of the US population living in urban areas and 82% of the total population. We focused on MSA populations after finding that these populations were more uniformly impacted by COVID-19 than state populations. Our maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimates for R range from 1.9 to 7.7 and quantify the relative susceptibilities of regional populations to spread of respiratory diseases. ONE-SENTENCE SUMMARY: Initial contagiousness of Coronavirus Disease 2019 varied over a 4-fold range across urban areas of the United States.

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Source
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.epidem.2023.100718DOI Listing

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