Related papers: Epidemic modelling: aspects where stochasticity ma…
In recent years the role of epidemic models in informing public health policies has progressively grown. Models have become increasingly realistic and more complex, requiring the use of multiple data sources to estimate all quantities of…
Epidemic models currently play a central role in our attempts to understand and control infectious diseases. Here, we derive a model for the diffusion limit of stochastic susceptible-infectious-removed (SIR) epidemic dynamics on a…
We propose a compartmental model for epidemiology wherein the population is split into groups with either comply or refuse to comply with protocols designed to slow the spread of a disease. Parallel to the disease spread, we assume that…
A key parameter in models for the spread of infectious diseases is the basic reproduction number $R_0$, which is the expected number of secondary cases a typical infected primary case infects during its infectious period in a large mostly…
Infectious disease outbreaks have precipitated a profusion of mathematical models. Epidemic curves predicted by these models are typically qualitatively similar, despite distinct model assumptions, but there is no theoretical explanation…
An important issue in theoretical epidemiology is the epidemic threshold phenomenon, which specify the conditions for an epidemic to grow or die out. In standard (mean-field-like) compartmental models the concept of the basic reproductive…
In Part 1, we introduced a stochastic model of an infectious disease, based on the BDI (birth and death with immigration) process. We showed that random processes defined by this model can capture the essence of the stochastic, often…
Early estimates of the transmission potential of emerging and re-emerging infections are increasingly used to inform public health authorities on the level of risk posed by outbreaks. Existing methods to estimate the reproduction number…
Why are the epidemic patterns of COVID-19 so different among different cities or countries which are similar in their populations, medical infrastructures, and people's behavior? Why are forecasts or predictions made by so-called experts…
The Susceptible-Infectious-Recovered (SIR) equations and their extensions comprise a commonly utilized set of models for understanding and predicting the course of an epidemic. In practice, it is of substantial interest to estimate the…
An SEIRS epidemic with disease fatalities is introduced in a growing population (modelled as a super-critical linear birth and death process). The study of the initial phase of the epidemic is stochastic, while the analysis of the major…
The purpose of this paper is to analyze the mechanism for the interplay of deterministic and stochastic models for contagious diseases. Deterministic models for contagious diseases are prone to predict global stability. Small natural birth…
We consider the edge-based compartmental models for epidemic spread developed in Part I. We show conditions under which simpler models may be substituted for more detailed models, and in so doing we define a hierarchy of epidemic models. In…
We present "interoperability" as a guiding framework for statistical modelling to assist policy makers asking multiple questions using diverse datasets in the face of an evolving pandemic response. Interoperability provides an important set…
We introduce an epidemic model with varying infectivity and general exposed and infectious periods, where the infectivity of each individual is a random function of the elapsed time since infection, those function being i.i.d. for the…
The SIR model is the cornerstone model for mathematical epidemiology, explaining key epidemic features such as the second-order transition between disease-free and epidemic states, the initial exponential growth of outbreaks or the…
For a recently derived pairwise model of network epidemics with non-Markovian recovery, we prove that under some mild technical conditions on the distribution of the infectious periods, smaller variance in the recovery time leads to higher…
Consider an epidemic model with a constant flux of susceptibles, in a situation where the corresponding deterministic epidemic model has a unique stable endemic equilibrium. For the associated stochastic model, whose law of large numbers…
A compartmental deterministic model that allows (1) immunity from two stages of infection and carriage, and (2) disease induced death, is used in studying the dynamics of meningitis epidemic process in a closed population. It allows for…
Consider a uniformly mixing population which grows as a super-critical linear birth and death process. At some time an infectious disease (of SIR or SEIR type) is introduced by one individual being infected from outside. It is shown that…