Estimating the basic reproduction number at the beginning of an outbreak under incomplete data

We compare different methods of estimating the basic reproduction number, R ₀ , focusing on the early stages of an epidemic, and considering weekly reports of new infecteds. We study three standard epidemiological models: SIR, SEIR, and SEAIR and examine the sensitivity of the estimators to the model structure. As some methods are developed assuming specific epidemiological models, our work adds a study of their performance in both the well- and miss-specified settings. We focus on parameters matching various types of respiratory viruses, although the general approach is easily extendable to other scenarios.