“…Because of their reliance on pre‐determined time periods, counting processes miss the opportunity for an outbreak decision that each event offers. Therefore, an alternative in the form of time between events (TBE) has emerged (see Kittlitz, Benneyan, Jones and Champ, Alemi and Neuhauser, Liu et al, Zimmermann et al, Sharma et al, Khoo and Xie, Xie et al, Dogu, Chen, Demirhan and Hamurkaroglu, Qu et al, Zhao and Gilbert, Shafae et al, Yang et al, Kumar and Chakraborti, and Cheng et al). A recent paper by Sparks et al demonstrated that event outbreaks were detected earlier using TBE as compared to counting processes.…”