Size of Outbreaks Near the Epidemic Threshold

Abstract

The spread of infectious diseases near the epidemic threshold is investigated. Scaling laws for the size and the duration of outbreaks originating from a single infected individual in a large susceptible population are obtained. The maximal size of an outbreak n_* scales as N^{2/3} with N the population size. This scaling law implies that the average outbreak size <n> scales as N^{1/3}. Moreover, the maximal and the average duration of an outbreak grow as t_* ~ N^{1/3} and <t> ~ ln N, respectively.

4 pages, 5 figures

References in corpus (1)

• Exchange Driven Growth

Cited by in corpus (11)

• Critical phenomena in complex networks
• On the critical behavior of the Susceptible-Infected-Recovered (SIR) model on a square lattice
• Solution of an infection model near threshold
• Phase Transition with Non-Thermodynamic States in Reversible Polymerization
• Critical behavior of the SIS epidemic model with time-dependent infection rate
• Scaling Behavior of Threshold Epidemics
• Novel exponents control the quasi-deterministic limit of the extinction transition
• Robustness of correlated networks against propagating attacks
• Crossover from weak to strong disorder regime in the duration of epidemics
• Recursive contact tracing in Reed-Frost epidemic models
• Epidemic Forecast Follies