Temporal variability in epidemic spread 

Project description

Most models for the spread of an epidemic assume that the rate of (infectious) contact between any pair of individuals is constant over time. This is clearly unrealistic with an individual having different interactions with other individuals over the course of a day, for example, the individual could be at work or school at 9am and with family or socialising at 9pm. On longer time scales interactions vary over the course of a week (weekday versus weekend) or can be seasonal over the course of a year with possibly the rate of infection varying seasonally. The incorporation of temporal variability in contact between individuals makes modelling the spread of the disease harder to analyse raising the question, is it important or not to incorporate this feature?

This project will use a range of stochastic processes to explore the impact of variation in contact rates on the epidemic and consider suitable continuous and/or discrete time approximations of the epidemic process to study key epidemic quantities such as the probability and size of a major epidemic outbreak.