WKB theory of epidemic fade-out in stochastic populations

Abstract

Stochastic effects may cause fade-out of an infectious disease in a population immediately after an epidemic outbreak. We develop WKB theory to determine the most probable path of the system toward epidemic fade-out and to evaluate the fade-out probability. The most probable path is an instanton-like orbit in the phase space of the underlying Hamiltonian flow.

4 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (1)

• Extinction of an infectious disease: a large fluctuation in a non-equilibrium system

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