Household epidemic models and McKean–Vlasov Poisson driven stochastic differential equations

Abstract

This paper presents a new view of household epidemic models, where the interaction between the households is of mean field type. We thus obtain in the limit of infinitely many households a nonlinear Markov process solution of a McKean - Vlasov type Poisson driven SDE, and a propagation of chaos result. We also define a basic reproduction number R0, and show that if R0>1, then the nonlinear Markov process has a unique non trivial ergodic invariant probability measure, whereas if R0<=1, it converges to 0 as t tends to infinity.