Disease extinction in the presence of non-Gaussian noise

TL;DR

This paper studies how stochastic effects and random vaccinations influence disease extinction, revealing that noise and vaccination strategies significantly alter extinction rates and critical behavior in epidemic models.

Contribution

It introduces a novel analysis of stochastic epidemic extinction under non-Gaussian noise, highlighting the impact of Poisson vaccination on extinction dynamics.

Findings

Extinction rate scales with distance to bifurcation point with an unusual critical exponent.

Poisson-distributed vaccinations exponentially increase extinction rates.

Vaccination parameters critically influence the extinction dynamics.

Abstract

We investigate stochastic extinction in an epidemic model and the impact of random vaccinations in large populations. We show that, in the absence of vaccinations, the effective entropic barrier for extinction displays scaling with the distance to the bifurcation point, with an unusual critical exponent. Even a comparatively weak Poisson-distributed vaccination leads to an exponential increase in the extinction rate, with the exponent that strongly depends on the vaccination parameters.