Speaker:   Zhifu Xie, University of Southern Mississippi

Title: Modeling the Intervention of Vaccination and 2014 Ebola Outbreak in Liberia

Abstract: In this talk, I will introduce how we extend the SEIHFR model to analyze epidemic trends and evaluate intervention efficacy including vaccination for the Ebola outbreak. The transmissions are quantified in different settings, specifically illness in the community, hospitalization, and traditional burial. We use existing data from Liberia to parameterize the model, estimate the basic reproduction number, and investigate how the vaccination could effectively change the epidemic by conducting sensitivity analysis on various epidemic scenarios. If a “random vaccination” strategy is adopted, vaccines should be given before an outbreak or as early as possible; we estimated a threshold for Liberia. According to our estimates, the effective vaccination rate for Liberia was 48.74% (95% confidence interval (48.07%, 49.39%)) among susceptible individuals. If a “ring vaccination” strategy is adopted, vaccines should be given to reduce the transmission rate by carefully tracing the contact persons of an infected individual.