Author:
Pinotti Francesco,Obolski Uri,Wikramaratna Paul,Giovanetti Marta,Paton Robert,Klenerman Paul,Thompson Craig,Gupta Sunetra,Lourenço José
Abstract
AbstractFor endemic pathogens, seroprevalence mimics overall exposure and is minimally influenced by the time that recent infections take to seroconvert. Simulating spatially-explicit and stochastic outbreaks, we set out to explore how, for emerging pathogens, the mix of exponential growth in infection events and a constant rate for seroconversion events could lead to real-time significant differences in the total numbers of exposed versus seropositive. We find that real-time seroprevalence of an emerging pathogen can underestimate exposure depending on measurement time, epidemic doubling time, duration and natural variation in the time to seroconversion among hosts. We formalise mathematically how underestimation increases non-linearly as the host’s time to seroconversion is ever longer than the pathogen’s doubling time, and how more variable time to seroconversion among hosts results in lower underestimation. In practice, assuming that real-time seroprevalence reflects the true exposure to emerging pathogens risks overestimating measures of public health importance (e.g. infection fatality ratio) as well as the epidemic size of future waves. These results contribute to a better understanding and interpretation of real-time serological data collected during the emergence of pathogens in infection-naive host populations.
Funder
UKRI GCRF One Health Poultry Hub
Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa of Rio de Janeiro
NIHR Senior Fellowship and the NIHR Biomedical Research Centre
ERC ‘UNIFLUVAC’
MRC CiC 6
Georg und Emily Von Opel Foundation
Department of Zoology, University of Oxford
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Cited by
3 articles.
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