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Dissecting Host-virus Interaction in Lytic Replication of a Model Herpesvirus
Published on: October 7, 2011
Exact solution of infection dynamics with gamma distribution of generation intervals
1German Aerospace Center (DLR), Institute for the Protection of Terrestrial Infrastructures, Rathausallee 12, 53757 Sankt Augustin, Germany.
Abstract:
Infectious disease outbreaks are expected to grow exponentially in time but their initial dynamics is less known. Here I derive analytical expressions for the infectious disease dynamics with a gamma distribution of generation intervals. Excluding the exponential distribution, the outbreak grows as a power law at short times. At long times, the dynamics is exponential with a growth rate determined by the basic reproductive number and the parameters of the generation interval distribution. These analytical expressions can be deployed to do better estimates of infectious disease parameters.
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