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statistics, often derived from simplified models of epidemic spread, inform public health policy in real time. The instantaneous reproduction number, R t , is predominant among these statistics, measuring the average ability of an infection to multiply. However, R t encodes no temporal information and is sensitive to modelling assumptions. Consequently, some have proposed the epidemic growth rate, r t , that is, the rate of change of the log-transformed case incidence, as a more temporally meaningful and model-agnostic policy guide. We examine this assertion, identifying if and when estimates of r t are more informative than those of R t . We assess their relative strengths both for learning about pathogen transmission mechanisms and for guiding public health interventions in real time.
Parag et al. (Thu,) studied this question.