ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2019
Rigorous surveillance is necessary for high confidence in end-of-outbreak declarations for Ebola and other infectious diseases.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 24 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
24 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Key questions for modelling COVID-19 exit strategies.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2020Pooled it
- Sub-national modelling of surveillance sensitivity to inform declaration of disease elimination: A retrospective validation against the elimination of wild poliovirus in Nigeria.PLoS computational biology · 2026Article
- Real-time inference of the end of an outbreak: Temporally aggregated disease incidence data and under-reporting.Infectious Disease Modelling · 2025Article
- Estimation of end-of-outbreak probabilities in the presence of delayed and incomplete case reporting.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Using real-time modelling to inform the 2017 Ebola outbreak response in DR Congo.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Optimizing the timing of an end-of-outbreak declaration: Ebola virus disease in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.Science advances · 2024Article
- Review state-of-the-art of output-based methodological approaches for substantiating freedom from infection.Frontiers in veterinary science · 2024Review
- Exact calculation of end-of-outbreak probabilities using contact tracing data.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2023Article
- Investigation of and Strategies to Control the Final Cluster of the 2018-2020 Ebola Virus Disease Outbreak in the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.Open forum infectious diseases · 2022Article
- A quantitative method to project the probability of the end of an epidemic: Application to the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, 2020.Journal of theoretical biology · 2022Article
- Assessment of Food and Waterborne Viral Outbreaks by Using Field Epidemiologic, Modern Laboratory and Statistical Methods-Lessons Learnt from Seven Major Norovirus Outbreaks in Finland.Pathogens (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Article
- A Quantitative Framework for Defining the End of an Infectious Disease Outbreak: Application to Ebola Virus Disease.American journal of epidemiology · 2021Article
- Localized end-of-outbreak determination for coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19): examples from clusters in Japan.International journal of infectious diseases : IJID : official publication of the International Society for Infectious Diseases · 2021Article
- Article
- Spillover or endemic? Reconsidering the origins of Ebola virus disease outbreaks by revisiting local accounts in light of new evidence from Guinea.BMJ global health · 2021Article
- How epidemics end.Centaurus; international magazine of the history of science and medicine · 2021Article
- An exact method for quantifying the reliability of end-of-epidemic declarations in real time.PLoS computational biology · 2020Article
- Will an outbreak exceed available resources for control? Estimating the risk from invading pathogens using practical definitions of a severe epidemic.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2020Article
- On a Coupled Time-Dependent SIR Models Fitting with New York and New-Jersey States COVID-19 Data.Biology · 2020Article
- Improved inference of time-varying reproduction numbers during infectious disease outbreaks.Epidemics · 2019Article
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3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
The World Health Organization considers an Ebola outbreak to have ended once 42 days have passed since the last possible exposure to a confirmed case. Benefits of a quick end-of-outbreak declaration, such as reductions in trade/travel restrictions, must be balanced against the chance of flare-ups from undetected residual cases. We show how epidemiological modelling can be used to estimate the surveillance level required for decision-makers to be confident that an outbreak is over. Results from a simple model characterizing an Ebola outbreak suggest that a surveillance sensitivity (i.e. case reporting percentage) of 79% is necessary for 95% confidence that an outbreak is over after 42 days without symptomatic cases. With weaker surveillance, unrecognized transmission may still occur: if the surveillance sensitivity is only 40%, then 62 days must be waited for 95% certainty. By quantifying the certainty in end-of-outbreak declarations, public health decision-makers can plan and communicate more effectively. This article is part of the theme issue 'Modelling infectious disease outbreaks in humans, animals and plants: epidemic forecasting and control'. This issue is linked with the earlier theme issue 'Modelling infectious disease outbreaks in humans, animals and plants: approaches and important themes'.
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