Representations of human contact patterns and outbreak diversity in SIR epidemics

摘要

Models of how outbreaks of infectious disease emerge in a population of humans typically have two components—a so called compartmental model dividing the people into classes with respect to the disease and assigning transition rules between the classes, and a model for the contact pattern between people. Both these aspects affect the propagation of the epidemic outbreak, for example the predicted outbreak sizes. Contact patterns can be represented at different levels of information content: as a temporal network (with temporal information about the contacts and who that is in contact with whom), as a static network (without information bout the time of the contacts) or as a fully connected system (where everyone can be in contact with everyone with equal chance all the time). We compare the predicted final outbreak sizes for these three contact-pattern representations, given the current state of the outbreak. We find that the temporal component has a strong influence on the diversity of outbreak sizes.