Article
Details
Citation
Farkas JZ & Calsina A (2016) On a strain-structured epidemic model. Nonlinear Analysis: Real World Applications, 31, pp. 325-342. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nonrwa.2016.01.014
Abstract
We introduce and investigate an SIS-type model for the spread of an infectious disease, where the infected population is structured with respect to the different strain of the virus/bacteria they are carrying. Our aim is to capture the interesting scenario when individuals infected with different strains cause secondary (new) infections at different rates. Therefore, we consider a nonlinear infection process, which generalises the bilinear process arising from the classic mass-action assumption. Our main motivation is to study competition between different strains of a virus/bacteria. From the mathematical point of view, we are interested whether the nonlinear infection process leads to a well-posed model. We use a semilinear formulation to show global existence and positivity of solutions up to a critical value of the exponent in the nonlinearity. Furthermore, we establish the existence of the endemic steady state for particular classes of nonlinearities.
Keywords
Structured populations; epidemiology; super-spreaders; global existence; positive operators; steady states
Journal
Nonlinear Analysis: Real World Applications: Volume 31
Status | Published |
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Funders | The Carnegie Trust |
Publication date | 31/10/2016 |
Publication date online | 10/03/2016 |
Date accepted by journal | 25/01/2016 |
URL | http://hdl.handle.net/1893/22962 |
Publisher | Elsevier |
ISSN | 1468-1218 |