Visualizing the Effect of Interventions during the 2014-2015 West Africa Ebola Outbreak

Timothy Wildauer, a student from Bethany Lutheran College, worked with Dr. John Drake to test new methods of determining time of infection for Ebola patients.

Abstract: Data recorded during the 2014-2015 West Africa Ebola Outbreak indicates when patients presented themselves at a hospital for treatment. However, to know if interventions were successful, we need to know when patients became infected. The number of people who became infected on a given date is corrupted by the incubation period for us to see when patients begin showing symptoms. The current method for finding when people became infected is to shift the dates on the observed data set backwards by the average infection period. We developed two non-parametric filters to find when patients became infected with Ebola: multiple trials of randomly selecting incubation periods for patients, and a Ridge Regression. These methods were tested on simulated outbreaks of different difficulties to see which method worked best. We selected four interventions during the outbreak to see if there was an effect on the transmissibility of the disease. In Sierra Leone, the transmission rate dropped significantly after the country was shut down for three days in September 2014. After other events, the transmission changed significantly, but the change may be the natural course of the outbreak. Through testing we found that Random deconvolution achieves a high correlation with the infection curve.

 

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