A Comparison of Deterministic and Stochastic Susceptible-Infected-Susceptible (SIS) and Susceptible-Infected-Recovered (SIR) Models

Abstract

In this paper we build and analyze two stochastic epidemic models with death. The model assumes that only susceptible individuals (S) can get infected (I) and may die from this disease or a recovered individual becomes susceptible again (SIS model) or completely immune (SIR Model) for the remainder of the study period. Moreover, it is assumed there are no births, deaths, immigration or emigration during the study period; the community is said to be closed. In these infection disease models, there are two central questions: first it is the disease extinction or not and the second studies the time elapsed for such extinction, this paper will deal with this second question because the first answer corresponds to the basic reproduction number defined in the bibliography. More concretely, we study the mean-extinction of the diseases and the technique used here first builds the backward Kolmogorov differential equation and then solves it numerically using finite element method with FreeFem++. Our contribution and novelty are the following: however the reproduction number effectively concludes the extinction or not of the disease, it does not help to know its extinction times because example with the same reproduction numbers has very different time. Moreover, the SIS model is slower, a result that is not surprising, but this difference seems to increase in the stochastic models with respect to the deterministic ones, it is reasonable to assume some uncertainly.