A New Method for Estimating the Incidence of Infectious Diseases.

A New Method for Estimating the Incidence of Infectious Diseases. Am J Epidemiol. 2021 Feb 04;: Authors: McManus H, Callander D, Asselin J, McMahon J, Hoy JF, Templeton DJ, Fairley CK, Donovan B, Pedrana AE, Keen P, Wilson DP, Elliott J, Kaldor J, Liaw ST, Petoumenos K, Holt M, Hellard ME, Grulich AE, Carr A, Stoove MA, Guy RJ Abstract Ambitious World Health Organization targets for disease elimination require monitoring of epidemics using routine health data in settings of decreasing and low incidence. We evaluated two methods commonly applied to routine testing results to estimate incidence rates that assume uniform probability of infection between consecutive negative and positive tests based on: 1. the midpoint of this interval; and 2. a randomly selected point on this interval. We compared these with an approximation to the Poisson-binomial distribution which assigns partial incidence to time-periods based on the uniform probability of occurrence in these intervals. We assessed bias, variance and convergence of estimates using simulations of Weibull distributed failure times with systematically varied baseline incidence, and varying trend. We considered results for quarterly, half-yearly and yearly incidence estimation frequencies. We applied methods to assess human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) incidence in HIV-negative patients from the Treatment with Antiretrovirals and their Impact on Positive And Negative men study between 2...
Source: Am J Epidemiol - Category: Epidemiology Authors: Tags: Am J Epidemiol Source Type: research