Are Epidemic Growth Rates More Informative than Reproduction Numbers?
本文比较了瞬时再生数Rt和流行病增长率rt在指导实时公共卫生政策中的信息价值，评估了rt是否在时间意义和模型依赖性上优于Rt。
Abstract Summary statistics, often derived from simplified models of epidemic spread, inform public health policy in real time. The instantaneous reproduction number, Rt, is predominant among these statistics, measuring the average ability of an infection to multiply. However, Rt encodes no temporal information and is sensitive to modelling assumptions. Consequently, some have proposed the epidemic growth rate, rt, that is, the rate of change of the log-transformed case incidence, as a more temporally meaningful and model-agnostic policy guide. We examine this assertion, identifying if and when estimates of rt are more informative than those of Rt. We assess their relative strengths both for learning about pathogen transmission mechanisms and for guiding public health interventions in real time.