The infectiousness of a disease in a community of households

Abstract

Procedures for making inference about both the mean potential that an infective has for infecting a given susceptible from the same household, and the mean potential he has for infecting a given susceptible from another household are proposed. These estimation procedures provide a check for the assumption that the disease spreads homogeneously through the community, that is the assumption of homogeneous mixing. They also provide a means of checking whether or not the spread of infection within each household is essentially independent of the spread of the disease in the rest of the community. Common cold epidemic data from Tristan da Cunha are used to illustrate the results. © 1983 Biometrik..