Estimation of the Basic Reproductive Ratio for Dengue Fever at the Take-Off Period of Dengue Infection

Estimating the basic reproductive ratio ℛ (0) of dengue fever has continued to be an ever-increasing challenge among epidemiologists. In this paper we propose two different constructions to estimate ℛ (0) which is derived from a dynamical system of host-vector dengue transmission model. The construction is based on the original assumption that in the early states of an epidemic the infected human compartment increases exponentially at the same rate as the infected mosquito compartment (previous work). In the first proposed construction, we modify previous works by assuming that the rates of infection for mosquito and human compartments might be different. In the second construction, we add an improvement by including more realistic conditions in which the dynamics of an infected human compartments are intervened by the dynamics of an infected mosquito compartment, and vice versa. We apply our construction to the real dengue epidemic data from SB Hospital, Bandung, Indonesia, during the period of outbreak Nov. 25, 2008–Dec. 2012. We also propose two scenarios to determine the take-off rate of infection at the beginning of a dengue epidemic for construction of the estimates of ℛ (0): scenario I from equation of new cases of dengue with respect to time (daily) and scenario II from equation of new cases of dengue with respect to cumulative number of new cases of dengue. The results show that our first construction of ℛ (0) accommodates the take-off rate differences between mosquitoes and humans. Our second construction of the ℛ (0) estimation takes into account the presence of infective mosquitoes in the early growth rate of infective humans and vice versa. We conclude that the second approach is more realistic, compared with our first approach and the previous work.