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Outbreak statistics and scaling laws for externally driven epidemics (1401.0071v1)

Published 31 Dec 2013 in q-bio.PE and physics.data-an

Abstract: Power-law scalings are ubiquitous to physical phenomena undergoing a continuous phase transition. The classic Susceptible-Infectious-Recovered (SIR) model of epidemics is one such example where the scaling behavior near a critical point has been studied extensively. In this system the distribution of outbreak sizes scales as $P(n) \sim n{-3/2}$ at the critical point as the system size $N$ becomes infinite. The finite-size scaling laws for the outbreak size and duration are also well understood and characterized. In this work, we report scaling laws for a model with SIR structure coupled with a constant force of infection per susceptible, akin to a `reservoir forcing'. We find that the statistics of outbreaks in this system are fundamentally different than those in a simple SIR model. Instead of fixed exponents, all scaling laws exhibit tunable exponents parameterized by the dimensionless rate of external forcing. As the external driving rate approaches a critical value, the scale of the average outbreak size converges to that of the maximal size, and above the critical point, the scaling laws bifurcate into two regimes. Whereas a simple SIR process can only exhibit outbreaks of size $\mathcal{O}(N{1/3})$ and $\mathcal{O}(N)$ depending on whether the system is at or above the epidemic threshold, a driven SIR process can exhibit a richer spectrum of outbreak sizes that scale as $O(N{\xi})$ where $\xi \in (0,1] \backslash {2/3}$ and $\mathcal{O}((N/\log N){2/3})$ at the multi-critical point.

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