Volume 12, Number 11—November 2006
Research
Targeted Social Distancing Designs for Pandemic Influenza
Figure 5

Figure 5. Branching factor and the approximation of the reproductive number Ro. A) Overall and age class–specific branching factors as a function of generation averaged over 100 simulations. The standard deviations of these averages can be large (<0.72 at the peak value for teenagers) and reflect the heterogeneity within the person contact networks and from community to community. B) Branching factors for overall average and 3 example simulations compared with the bulk ratio of infections in a generation to those in the previous generation pooled across 100 simulations. We chose the maximum value of the bulk ratio (1.6) as an approximation of the reproductive number Ro.