incidence supports to fit early epidemic curve with sub-exponential growth?

[caijun]

Chowell et al. 2016 published a paper entitled “Mathematical models to characterize early epidemic growth: A review”, in which they review recent progress on modeling and characterizing early epidemic growth patterns from infectious disease outbreak data, and survey the types of mathematical formulations that are most useful for capturing a diversity of early epidemic growth profiles, ranging from sub-exponential to exponential growth dynamics. Therefore, I am thinking incidence package would be more powerful if fit() can capture more realistic early epidemic growth profiles, particularly including the sub-exponential growth dynamics.

Related papers:

• A generalized-growth model to characterize the early ascending phase of infectious disease outbreaks
• Inference of the generalized-growth model via maximum likelihood estimation: a reflection on the impact of overdispersion
• A practical generation-interval-based approach to inferring the strength of epidemics from their speed
• Effective containment explains subexponential growth in recent confirmed COVID-19 cases in China