Threshold behaviour of a stochastic SIR model

In this paper, we investigate the threshold behaviour of a susceptible-infected-recovered (SIR) epidemic model with stochastic perturbation. When the noise is small, we show that the threshold determines the extinction and persistence of the epidemic. Compared with the corresponding deterministic system, this value is affected by white noise, which is less than the basic reproduction number of the deterministic system. On the other hand, we obtain that the large noise will also suppress the epidemic to prevail, which never happens in the deterministic system. These results are illustrated by computer simulations.