For my work on norovirus, we use data (information) about how many people got ill last year, information about how long people are ill for on average with norovirus and how long they are immune for once they’ve had it, and a mathematical model.
I work on outbreaks that don’t necessarily happen every year (luckily for us). With Ebola in West Africa, for example, we look at how the numbers of new cases each day are going up or down (or even staying stable) in a particular area and we can extrapolate that trend, taking into account the number of people that live in the area and are susceptible to the disease.
We know that certain individuals are more susceptible than others e.g. those with no immune systems cannot receive vaccines – thus it is important that we attain high uptake rates so that there is ‘herd protection’.
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christldonnelly commented on :
I work on outbreaks that don’t necessarily happen every year (luckily for us). With Ebola in West Africa, for example, we look at how the numbers of new cases each day are going up or down (or even staying stable) in a particular area and we can extrapolate that trend, taking into account the number of people that live in the area and are susceptible to the disease.
You can see some projections we did for Ebola here: See figure 4 of http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1411100#t=article
Kevin commented on :
We know that certain individuals are more susceptible than others e.g. those with no immune systems cannot receive vaccines – thus it is important that we attain high uptake rates so that there is ‘herd protection’.