Abstract

Co-authors: Joan Saldana (Universitat de Girona), David Juher (Universitat de Girona)
 
This talk is concerned with stochastic SIR and SEIR epidemic models on random networks in which individuals may rewire away from infected neighbors at some rate ω (and reconnect to non-infectious individuals with probability α or else simply drop the edge if α=0), so-called preventive rewiring. The models are denoted SIR ω and SEIR ω, and we focus attention on the early stages of an outbreak, where we derive expression for the basic reproduction number R0 and the expected degree of the infectious nodes E(DI) using two different approximation approaches. The first approach approximates the early spread of an epidemic by a branching process, whereas the second one uses pair approximation. The expressions are compared with the corresponding empirical means obtained from stochastic simulations of SIR ω and SEIR ω epidemics on Poisson and scale-free networks. To appear in Bull Math Biol.