Modelling the spread of infectious diseases in complex metapopulations

Abstract

Two main approaches have been considered for modelling the dynamics of the SIS model on complex metapopulations, i.e, networks of populations connected by migratory flows whose configurations are described in terms of the connectivity distribution of nodes (patches) and the conditional probabilities of connections among classes of nodes sharing the same degree. In the first approach migration and transmission/recovery process alternate sequentially, and, in the second one, both processes occur simultaneously. Here we follow the second approach and give a necessary and sufficient condition for the instability of the disease-free equilibrium in generic networks under the assumption of limited (or frequency-dependent) transmission. Moreover, for uncorrelated networks and under the assumption of non-limited (or density-dependent) transmission, we give a bounding interval for the dominant eigenvalue of the Jacobian matrix of the model equations around the disease-free equilibrium. Finally, for this latter case, we study numerically the prevalence of the infection across the metapopulation as a function of the patch connectivity. © EDP Sciences, 2010.