Incidence, recovery and prevalence of infectious diseases: non-parametric disease model and application to influenza in Germany

Abstract: In this work we describe a non-parametric disease model that links the temporal change of the prevalence of an infectious disease to the incidence and the recovery rates. The model is only based on the common epidemiological measures incidence and recovery rate. As an application, the model is used to calculate the prevalence of influenza in Germany for a hypothetical birth cohort during 2001 and 2013.