How to predict when epidemics stop spreading across different populations

Epidemiologists use branching process models to estimate how diseases spread, but calculating final outbreak sizes for populations with different transmission rates has lacked a straightforward solution. The researchers developed a method using complex analysis to derive closed-form equations for these calculations and tested it on MERS data. This lets public health teams estimate transmission heterogeneity directly from cluster size data—crucial for understanding which groups drive outbreaks.