Mathias Lindholm, Stockholms Universitet
	
Endemic persistence or disease extinction: the effect of separation
into subcommunities

Abstract

We look at the so-called SIR model with demography for the case when
the population is separated into equally large subcommunities. Our aim
is to get a better understanding of how the degree of social
interaction between subcommunities effects the expected time to
extinction when the epidemic process is started at the endemic level
of infection, i.e. in quasi stationarity. We present two
approximations of the expected time to extinction based on Markov jump
processes.

Simulations indicate that the expected time to extinction increases as
the degree of social interaction between subcommunities
increases. This behaviour is also seen in both our approximations.