Inepidemiology, infectivity is the ability of a pathogen to establish an infection. More specifically, infectivity is the extent to which the pathogen can enter, survive, and multiply in a host. It is measured by the ratio of the number of people who become infected to the total number exposed to the pathogen.[1]
Infectivity has been shown to positively correlate with virulence, in plants. This means that as a pathogen's ability to infect a greater number of hosts increases, so does the level of harm it brings to the host.[2]
A pathogen's infectivity is different from its transmissibility, which refers to a pathogen's capacity to pass from one organism to another.[1]
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