Numerical considerations about the SIR epidemic model with infection age

TL;DR

This paper investigates the numerical aspects of the infection-age-dependent SIR epidemic model, proposing an algorithm for its solution and analyzing when the simpler conventional SIR model is a valid approximation.

Contribution

It introduces a numerical algorithm for solving the infection-age SIR model and assesses the conditions under which the conventional SIR model approximates it well.

Findings

Proposed an algorithm for infection-age SIR model solutions.

Identified conditions where the conventional SIR model is a good approximation.

Analyzed the impact on the effective reproduction number.

Abstract

We analyse the infection-age-dependent SIR model from a numerical point of view. First, we present an algorithm for calculating the solution the infection-age-structured SIR model without demography of the background host. Second, we examine how and under which conditions, the conventional SIR model (without infection-age) serves as a practical approximation to the infection-age SIR model. Special emphasis is given on the effective reproduction number.