Disentangling reporting and disease transmission

Second-order statistics such as the variance and autocorrelation can be useful indicators of the stability of randomly perturbed systems, in some cases providing early warning of an impending, dramatic change in the system’s dynamics. One specific application area of interest is the surveillance of infectious diseases. In the context of disease (re-)emergence, a goal could be to have an indicator that is informative of whether the system is approaching the epidemic threshold, a point beyond which a major outbreak becomes possible. Prior work in this area has provided some proof of this principle but has not analytically treated the effect of imperfect observation on the behavior of indicators. This work provides expected values for several moments of the number of reported cases, where reported cases follow a binomial or negative binomial distribution with a mean based on the number of deaths in a birth-death-immigration process over some reporting interval. The normalized second factorial moment and the decay time of the number of reported cases are two indicators that are insensitive to the reporting probability. Simulation is used to show how this insensitivity could be used to distinguish a trend of increased reporting from a trend of increased transmission. The simulation study also illustrates both the high variance of estimates and the possibility of reducing the variance by averaging over an ensemble of estimates from multiple time series.