In epidemiology, infectivity refers to the ability of a pathogen to establish an infection. More specifically, infectivity is a pathogen's capacity for horizontal transmission that is, how frequently it spreads among hosts that are not in a parent-child relationship. It is closely related to the concept of incidence, which is the measure of infectivity in a population.

Infectivity has been shown to positively correlate with virulence. 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.^[1]

A pathogen's infectivity is subtly but importantly different from its transmissibility, but refers to a pathogen's capacity to pass from parent to child.

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