Wednesday April 20, 3:40; PSA 307

Speaker: Fred Brauer, Department of Mathematics
	 University of British Columbia

Title: The Kermack-McKendrick epidemic model revisited.

Abstract:

The Kermack-McKendrick epidemic model of 1927 is an age-of-
infection model, that is, a model in which the infectivity of an
individual depends on the time since the individual was infected. A
special case, which is formulated as a two-dimensional system of
ordinary differential equations, has often been called the Kermack-
McKendrick model. One of the products of the SARS epidemic of 2002-3 was
a variety of epidemic models including general contact rates, quarantine,
and isolation. Most, but not all, of these models can be viewed as age of
infection epidemic models and analyzed using the approach of the full
Kermack-McKendrick model. All the models share the basic properties that
there is a threshold between disappearance of the disease and an epidemic,
and that an epidemic will die out without infecting the entire population.