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Li Chen et al 2013 EPL 104 50001 doi:10.1209/0295-5075/104/50001
Li Chen1, Fakhteh Ghanbarnejad1, Weiran Cai2 and Peter Grassberger1,3
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Modeling epidemic dynamics plays an important role in studying how diseases spread, predicting their future course, and designing strategies to control them. In this letter, we introduce a model of SIR (susceptible-infected-removed) type which explicitly incorporates the effect of cooperative coinfection. More precisely, each individual can get infected by two different diseases, and an individual already infected with one disease has an increased probability to get infected by the other. Depending on the amount of this increase, we prove different threshold scenarios. Apart from the standard continuous phase transition for single-disease outbreaks, we observe continuous transitions where both diseases must coexist, but also discontinuous transitions are observed, where a finite fraction of the population is already affected by both diseases at the threshold. All our results are obtained in a mean-field model using rate equations, but we argue that they should hold also in more general frameworks.
05.45.Xt Synchronization; coupled oscillators
89.75.Hc Networks and genealogical trees
87.23.Cc Population dynamics and ecological pattern formation
Issue 5 (December 2013)
Received 15 November 2013, accepted for publication 30 November 2013
Published 16 December 2013
Total article downloads: 1035
Li Chen et al 2013 EPL 104 50001
