Tom Britton: Stochastic Epidemic Models with group structures

Abstract

Social structures in communities are often formed in groups, such as households, workplaces, schools, ... Modern epidemic models try to capture such repeated type of contacts beside more random type contacts. In the first part of the talk we survey results for epidemic models having one group structure (households). In the second part we investigate what happens if a model neglects either the relative magnitude of group contacts, or the existence of some additional group group structure completely. For a wide class of epidemic models (but exceptions exist!) the meta theorem says that switching random contacts to new or existing group structures reduces the epidemic size. Properties of directed random networks is an important ingredient in the analysis.