title: Epidemic curve characteristics for the Reed-Frost model.
abstract: Some useful approximations are developed in this paper that describe large-scale epidemic phenomena for the deterministic and stochastic Reed-Frost model. These characteristics provide an a priori quantitative description of the epidemic curve for the deterministic case, such as a threshold requirement, the total size of the epidemic, and the degree of skewness in the epidemic curve. A Poisson distribution asymptotically describes the distribution of the total size of an epidemic when the relative removal rate is well below threshold for the Reed-Frost chain binomial model. These properties are established by an extension of the large-scale epidemic phenomena of the Kermack-McKendrick model.
authors.affiliation: Department of Electrical & Electronics Engineering, North Dakota State University, Fargo 58105.
authors.forename: J D
authors.initials: JD
authors.lastname: Enderle
mesh_terms: D016010:Binomial Distribution; D003141:Communicable Diseases / Q000453:epidemiology*; D004196:Disease Outbreaks; D006801:Humans; D015994:Incidence; D008954:Models, Biological; D015233:Models, Statistical; D013269:Stochastic Processes