Stochastic epidemic models: New behavioral indicators of the disease spreading

The purpose of this paper is to propose new indicators of the dynamics of infectious disease spread in stochastic epidemic models, including both global system-oriented descriptors (e.g. the final size measured as the number of individuals infected on a least one occasion during an outbreak) and individual-oriented descriptors (e.g. the time to reach an individual run of infections). We focus on birth-and-death models and the basic SIR epidemic model but the methodology remains valid for other nonlinear stochastic epidemic models. The theory is illustrated by numerical experiments which demonstrate that the proposed behavioral indicators can be applied efficiently.