General compartmental epidemic models

Abstract

The age of infection approach introduced by Kermack and Mckendrick in 1927 gives a unified way of describing and analyzing a variety of epidemic models, including models with multiple stages, treatment, and heterogeneous mixing. The author gives a description of the main results for such models, emphasizing the use of the final size relation to estimate the size of the epidemic. © 2010 Editorial Office of CAM (Fudan University) and Springer Berlin Heidelberg.