Methods for the estimation of basic epidemiological parameters are still in development phase. [10] provides a thoughtful summary of methods for estimating the reproductive number. One particularly interesting and useful method has been previously described by [7] for estimating the daily reproductive number, R t , or the average number of cases an infected individual on day t would cause. One interesting feature of this method is that for days where no cases are observed, the estimated effective reproductive number is zero. Another observation is that this method essentially estimates a curve for the effective reproductive number that traces the epidemic curve, lagged by the average serial interval length. This nonparametric method presupposes information on the serial interval distribution. This is typical as most methods for estimating the reproductive number rely on knowledge of the serial interval.