The Western Africa Ebola virus disease epidemic exhibits both global exponential and local polynomial growth rates

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  • 26 November 2014
Abstract
While many infectious disease epidemics are initially characterized by an exponential growth in time, we show that district-level Ebola virus disease (EVD) outbreaks in West Africa follow slower polynomial-based growth kinetics over several generations of the disease. Although the nationally-aggregated number of EVD cases in Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia grew exponentially during the early epidemic phase, this pattern was caused by the aggregation of asynchronous local epidemics. We review potential mechanisms that could explain the non-exponential growth dynamics of disease spread, and conclude that factors related to the epidemiology of EVD, behavior changes of the at-risk population, and success of control interventions could be involved alone or in combination. These observations suggest that quantifying the contribution of each of these factors could help guide expectations of final epidemic size and mitigation efforts in the current and future EVD outbreaks.

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