https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2017-70723-6
Regular Article
Epidemics spread in heterogeneous populations
Marian Smoluchowski Institute of Physics, and Mark Kac Center for Complex Systems Research, Jagiellonian Universityul. St. Łojasiewicza 11 30–348 Kraków Poland
a
e-mail: karol.capala@uj.edu.pl
b
e-mail: bartek@th.if.uj.edu.pl
Received: 8 December 2016
Received in final form: 15 March 2017
Published online: 4 May 2017
Individuals building populations are subject to variability. This variability affects progress of epidemic outbreaks, because individuals tend to be more or less resistant. Individuals also differ with respect to their recovery rate. Here, properties of the SIR model in inhomogeneous populations are studied. It is shown that a small change in model’s parameters, e.g. recovery or infection rate, can substantially change properties of final states which is especially well-visible in distributions of the epidemic size. In addition to the epidemic size and radii distributions, the paper explores first passage time properties of epidemic outbreaks.
Key words: Computational Methods
© The Author(s) 2017. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com
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