We now provide results to illustrate the impact of these reporting schemes on the estimation of R 0 . In the following scenarios we use the branching process estimator to avoid the complication of the serial interval. In essence this implies that we assume that the serial interval is one day long in all scenarios or that the data is grouped into generations, rather than days or some other time unit. We now compare the two branching process estimators of the reproductive number,R 0 and  R 0 that make use of the observed numbers of cases denoted by M t = {M 1 , ....,