Abstract
We construct a stochastic SIR model for influenza spreading on a D-dimensional lattice, which represents the dynamic contact network of individuals. An age distributed population is placed on the lattice and moves on it. The displacement from a site to a nearest neighbor empty site, allows individuals to change the number and identities of their contacts. The dynamics on the lattice is governed by an attractive interaction between individuals belonging to the same age-class. The parameters, which regulate the pattern dynamics, are fixed fitting the data on the age-dependent daily contact numbers, furnished by the Polymod survey. A simple SIR transmission model with a nearest neighbors interaction and some very basic adaptive mobility restrictions complete the model. The model is validated against the age-distributed Italian epidemiological data for the influenza A(H1N1) during the season, with sensible predictions for the epidemiological parameters. For an appropriate topology of the lattice, we find that, whenever the accordance between the contact patterns of the model and the Polymod data is satisfactory, there is a good agreement between the numerical and the experimental epidemiological data. This result shows how rich is the information encoded in the average contact patterns of individuals, with respect to the analysis of the epidemic spreading of an infectious disease.
Highlights
There are two major approaches to model the spreading of an infectious disease in a space-structured population that are mostly used in recent literature: the Individual Based Models (IBM) and the Metapopualtion Models
Summarizing, the main motivation of the present study is to show that a simple SIR model for the spreading of an infectious disease, coupled with a lattice-gas model for the underlying contact dynamics, is able to reproduce the age-dependent epidemiological curves of an epidemic outbreak
Applying the dynamics rules described in the previous section, we simulate the contact patterns of individuals in absence of infectious diseases
Summary
There are two major approaches to model the spreading of an infectious disease in a space-structured population that are mostly used in recent literature: the Individual Based Models (IBM) and the Metapopualtion Models. The parameters, which govern the dynamic behavior of individuals, are chosen to reproduce the total daily number of contacts of Polymod data in each age class.
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