Paper Information

Decisions based on surveillance data that are suggestive but not conclusive about the existence of a disease outbreak can be modeled.

Study the decision to issue a boil-water advisory in response to a spike in sales of diarrhea remedies or wait 72 hours for the results of definitive testing of water and people.

Decision analysis.

In the base-case analysis, the optimal decision is test-and-wait. If the cost of issuing a boil-water advisory is less than 13.92 cents per person per day, the optimal decision is to issue the boil-water advisory immediately.