From the Yale Daily News
September 10, 2019
Using only data collected from travelers to Cuba, researchers at Yale, Scripps Research Institute and Florida Gulf Coast University detected an outbreak of the Zika virus in Cuba in 2017 that had not been previously reported.
In the study, incidence rates of Zika among travelers to Cuba were used to estimate the incidence rates among Cuban locals. After comparing Zika incidence rates in travelers and locals in Puerto Rico, Jamaica, the Dominican Republic and other countries, the researchers were able to use Zika incidence rates of travelers to Cuba to estimate the number of local Zika cases in Cuba.
“While the methods we used have been used before, the combination of methods that we used made this study the first to have reconstructed an outbreak without any data from local sources,” said Nathan Grubaugh, epidemiology professor at the Yale School of Public Health and corresponding author of the study.