Individual and population level uncertainty interact to determine the performance of outbreak surveillance systems
Fig 2
The accuracy of outbreak detection systems under different testing rates and noise structures, at their respective optimal alert thresholds.
The shaded bands illustrate the 80% central interval, and the solid/dashed lines represent the mean estimate. Each imperfect test uses the same value for both its sensitivity and specificity (either 85% or 90%). Solid lines represent tests with 0-day turnaround times, and dashed lines represent tests with result delays. Λ(4) indicates the mean noise incidence is 4 times higher than the mean measles incidence, for example.