Detecting Presymptomatic Infection Is Necessary to Forecast Major Epidemics in the Earliest Stages of Infectious Disease Outbreaks
Fig 1
Incorrect estimation of the probability of a major outbreak.
The number of presymptomatic infected individuals is estimated (giving a distribution of possible values), and these values are used as initial conditions in forward simulations to build a point estimate of the probability of a major outbreak (bottom left—here, the estimated probability of a major outbreak is 0.55). However, the number of presymptomatic infected individuals actually takes a single value, which can be used in forward simulations to determine the true probability of a major outbreak (bottom right—here, the true probability of a major outbreak is 0.78). The underlying dataset is simulated using the SEIR model, and the predicted future behaviors shown are generated using 100,000 forward simulations of the model.