Assessing epidemic curves for evidence of superspreading.

The expected number of secondary infections arising from each index case, referred to as the reproduction or number, is a vital summary statistic for understanding and managing epidemic diseases. There are many methods for estimating ; however, few explicitly model heterogeneous disease reproduction, which gives rise to superspreading within the population. We propose a parsimonious discrete-time branching process model for epidemic curves that incorporates heterogeneous individual reproduction numbers.