Analyzing the spatial distribution pattern of infection cases using mathematical likelihood: Implication on airborne disease transmission and risk assessment

Abstract

This study proposes a method to analyze the spatial distribution of infection cases in outbreaks of airborne transmissible diseases. Infection risk assessment is first performed to estimate the infection risks of the susceptible people in the outbreak. A modified likelihood function could then be used to establish the likelihood of the estimated infection risk which is the true infection risk. The method can be used to estimate unknown parameters in the outbreak, such as the infectious source strength. A real outbreak of chickenpox was analyzed to demonstrate the use of the proposed method. It was found that the estimation of the quanta generation rate using the classical well-mixed assumption would cause significant error in the selected outbreak case.