Principles, Predictions, and Control
Joshua Weitz
Theoretical Ecology and Quantitative Biology, Georgia Tech

The Ebola epidemic in West Africa has spurred an international response. This response has been strongly influenced by epidemiological models that predicted a devastating rise in cases without large-scale changes in behavior and intervention. In this talk, I introduce the mathematical principles underlying predictions of the rate and scope of a disease epidemic. I then explain how such principles have been applied to forecasting Ebola virus disease (EVD) dynamics and identifying the type and scale of necessary control. One of the challenges is estimating the relative importance of transmission routes, including post-death transmission, from early-stage epidemic data. I show why such estimation is hard given noisy data and why recognizing the limits to inference can influence efforts to control epidemic outcomes