Figure 1.

VM ratios of incidence and reproduction numbers. We simulate 2000 epidemics under a reproduction number profile that has fixed mean of 2.5 up to s = 80 and then a step change fall to 0.5 until elimination, using the generation time distribution from [14]. We vary the offspring dispersion parameter k of the renewal model used to generate the epidemics and compute the VM ratios of event reproduction numbers R_s and incidence I_s at every time s. In line with equation (2.4), there is a strong correspondence between VM[R_s] and VM[I_s] (mediated by the total infectiousness ${\Lambda }_s$) and smaller k (larger heterogeneity) inflates both values.