Boston Universitys Urban Myth

A Section taken from: Boston Universitys Urban Myth By Lynn Klotz

Quantifying our intuition Can our intuition be so wrong? Is disease transmission in an urban setting really as slow as in a rural setting? The usual measure of disease transmission is the average number of persons infected by an infected person, denoted by the symbol R o. Lets use SARS as an example. Tetra Techs Ro numbers for SARS allow us to illustrate the dramatic effect of the higher urban Ro value. From a survey of the literature, Tetra Tech reports that average Ro values for SARS are 3.0 for urban settings and 1.42 for rural settings.1 In the table below, the number of infections for five rounds of transmission of SARS in both a rural and urban setting is calculated.
Num bersof Infections
Num ber of G enerations or R ounds for T ransm issions 1 2 3 4 5 Urban S etting 3
9 27 81 243

R ural S etting 1.42

2.02 2.86 4.07 5.77

Here is how the table numbers are calculated. In an urban setting, one person infects three other persons in the first round (or generation) of transmissions, each of those three infected people then infect three people in the second round leaving nine infected people, and so on through the five rounds in the table. In the rural setting one person infects 1.42 people in the first round, who go on to infect 1.42 x 1.42 = 2.02 people in the second round, and so on. In line with our intuition, the number of infections increases much faster in the urban setting.

Final RA, op. cit., Appendix L, Table L-31, page L-83