Epidemics with partial immunity to reinfection

Abstract

We obtain analytical results about epidemics generated by the partial immunity model of Gomes et al. [3], in which infection confers partial immunity to reinfection. When the demographic process is excluded, the behavior switches from epidemic to endemic as the basic reproduction number R 0 crosses the reinfection threshold R 0 = 1 σ . We derive formulas for two quantities characterizing the size of the epidemic below the reinfection threshold: the attack rate A, which is the fraction of the population infected at least once, and the final size Z, which is the average number of infections per individual. We also derive a system of differential equations which can be used to obtain more detailed information, such as the fraction of the population infected n times throughout the epidemic, for every n.