Kristoffer Spricer: Rate of Growth of Epidemics on some Empirical Networks

When the epidemic spread of diseases is modelled, often exponential growth of the number of infected people is either implicitly assumed or obtained analytically as an asymptotic result for a large population. In this seminar we investigate epidemics in discrete time and study the reproduction number at the beginning of the epidemic on some real world networks. For reference, similar investigations are done on some elementary graphs such as the integer lattice and the configuration model. In order to let the epidemic spread for enough generations to observe the initial growth, we restrict the epidemic by restricting the number of people each infected person can infect or by Bernoulli thinning of the edges in the network.