The Ebola virus in West Africa has infected almost 30,000 and killed over
11,000 people. Recent models of Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) have often made
assumptions about how the disease spreads, such as uniform transmissibility and
homogeneous mixing within a population. In this paper, we test whether these
assumptions are necessarily correct, and offer simple solutions that may
improve disease model accuracy. First, we use data and models of West African
migration to show that EVD does not homogeneously mix, but spreads in a
predictable manner. Next, we estimate the initial growth rate of EVD within
country administrative divisions and find that it significantly decreases with
population density. Finally, we test whether EVD strains have uniform
transmissibility through a novel statistical test, and find that certain
strains appear more often than expected by chance.Comment: 16 pages, 14 figure
