Statistical Analysis of Data from Early Stage of Pandemic Influenza A(H1N1) 2009

• Activity Number: 480
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Wednesday, August 4, 2010 : 8:30 AM to 10:20 AM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistics in Epidemiology
• Author(s): Shenghai Zhang*+
• Companies: Public Health Agency of Canada
• Keywords: Pandemic influenza ; Epidemiology ; Case fatality ratio ; Reproduction number ; non-parametric methods

Abstract

The emergence of a novel influenza A(H1N1) virus was announced by World Health Organization(WHO) in late April 2009. There are many studies for the novel influenza A(H1N1) 2009, especially in estimating the reproduction number (R) defined as the average number of secondary cases arising from the introduction of a single primary case into an otherwise fully susceptible population, which is most important summary measure of transmission potential of the outbreak caused by the novel swine-origin influenza A(H1N1) strain. For severity of the pandemic, the case fatality ratio (CFR) which is the number of cases of the diseases ending in death divided by the number of cases of the diseases is a representative measurement. The estimation of R and CFR in the initial stage of the pandemic by applying non-parametric methods to data from reported cases to WHO is discussed in the article.