Berlin 2012 – scientific programme
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DY: Fachverband Dynamik und Statistische Physik
DY 1: Statistical Physics of Biological Systems I (with BP, talks from DY)
DY 1.7: Talk
Monday, March 26, 2012, 11:00–11:15, MA 001
The role of diffusion in the SIRS epidemic model — Fernando Peruani1 and •Chiu Fan Lee2 — 1Lab. J.A.Dieudonné, Université de Nice - Sophia Antipolis — 2Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems, Dresden, Germany
In the well-mixed limit of the classical SIRS epidemic model, an initial epidemic outbreak will persist if the basic reproductive number is larger than 1. This quantity indicates the number of secondary cases caused by an infected individual and is believed to depend exclusively on the parameters relevant to the spreading of the disease. If the individuals in the system also diffuse, it is unclear how this epidemic threshold will be affected. In this work, we perform extensive lattice-based simulations to demonstrate that the epidemic threshold and the average number of infected individuals are in fact strongly affected by the diffusion coefficient, D, exhibited by the agents. We then support our numerical results with field-theoretic analysis.