Quasi-Neutral theory of epidemic outbreaks

Some epidemics have been empirically observed to exhibit outbreaks of all possible sizes, i.e., to be scalefree or scale-invariant. Different explanations for this finding have been put forward; among them there is a model for "accidental pathogens" which leads to power-law distributed out...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:arXiv.org 2011-09
Main Authors: Pinto, Oscar A, Muñoz, Miguel A
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Electric power distribution
Epidemics
Fractals
Outbreaks
Pathogens
Percolation
Phenomenology
Scale invariance
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Some epidemics have been empirically observed to exhibit outbreaks of all possible sizes, i.e., to be scalefree or scale-invariant. Different explanations for this finding have been put forward; among them there is a model for "accidental pathogens" which leads to power-law distributed outbreaks without apparent need of parameter fine tuning. This model has been claimed to be related to self-organized criticality, and its critical properties have been conjectured to be related to directed percolation. Instead, we show that this is a (quasi) neutral model, analogous to those used in Population Genetics and Ecology, with the same critical behavior as the voter-model, i.e. the theory of accidental pathogens is a (quasi)-neutral theory. This analogy allows us to explain all the system phenomenology, including generic scale invariance and the associated scaling exponents, in a parsimonious and simple way.
ISSN:2331-8422
DOI:10.48550/arxiv.1106.3925