Figure 6.
VM ratios for simulated epidemics. Using either a GW branching process [2] (top) or a renewal model [21] (bottom) we simulate 104 trajectories under a step-change in mean effective reproduction number, ρμ, from 2.5 to 0.6, with dispersion k = 0.25. At each time point we draw event reproduction numbers from the uniform, super-spreading and sub-spreading distributions with these means. We consistently find, for waning epidemics, that sub-spreading minimizes VM ratios of the incidence (denoted Is at time s). The mean incidence from all methods is approximately the same.