In our analysis, we also implement the method described by [12] (hereafter referred to as the Garske et al. method) and compare the results of the two methodologies. This method first estimates the generation time distribution using a likelihood based method. Then the effective reproductive number is estimated using the method described by [7] (hereafter referred to as the WT method). We fit the likelihood for both methods using a Nelder-Mead maximization procedure and use 576 starting values in order to ensure that we reach the global maximum. All analyses were done using R 2.4.1.