The ideal reporting interval for an epidemic to objectively interpret the epidemiological time course

The reporting interval of infectious diseases is often determined as a time unit in the calendar regardless of the epidemiological characteristics of the disease. No guidelines have been proposed to choose the reporting interval of infectious diseases. The present study aims at translating coarsely reported epidemic data into the reproduction number and clarifying the ideal reporting interval to offer detailed insights into the time course of an epidemic. We briefly revisit the dispersibility ratio, i.e. ratio of cases in successive reporting intervals, proposed by Clare Oswald Stallybrass, detecting technical flaws in the historical studies. We derive a corrected expression for this quantity and propose simple algorithms to estimate the effective reproduction number as a function of time, adjusting the reporting interval to the generation time of a disease and demonstrating a clear relationship among the generation-time distribution, reporting interval and growth rate of an epidemic. Our exercise suggests that an ideal reporting interval is the mean generation time, so that the ratio of cases in successive intervals can yield the reproduction number. When it is impractical to report observations every mean generation time, we also present an alternative method that enables us to obtain straightforward estimates of the reproduction number for any reporting interval that suits the practical purpose of infection control.

Antialiasing methods in Kirchhoff migration

This paper addresses some practical aspects of antialiasing in Kirchhoff migration. We show that the effective trace spacing related to the aliasing‐frequency limits for directions between the in‐line and cross‐line directions is smaller than values previously used and that the frequency limits for antialiasing may be increased. We present a corrected expression for the migration operator spatial derivative for 3-D time migration that avoids the overfiltering at nonzero offsets produced by a previous approximation. Simple operator truncation is shown to reduce aliasing noise; it is inexpensive but may lead to errors in interpretation. Triangle filtering and Gray’s method both produce similar results, but the relative costs of these two methods will vary with the size of the migration and the computational environment. Gray’s method takes more setup time for each input trace than does triangle filtering, but Gray’s method might be more cost effective when each input trace contributes to a large number of output traces.