Criticality in stochastic SIR model for infectious diseases

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the stochastic SIR model for infectious diseases, revealing that stochastic fluctuations lower the critical reproduction number below 1 and can generate endemic states absent in the deterministic model.

Contribution

It introduces a path-integral formalism and both perturbative and nonperturbative analyses to determine the stochastic critical value of the basic reproduction number in the SIR model.

Findings

Critical value ${ m R}_c$ is between 1/3 and 2/3 in perturbation theory.

Effective potential analysis suggests ${ m R}_c=2/3$ for long-term behavior.

Stochastic fluctuations can produce endemic states not seen in the classical SIR model.

Abstract

We discuss the criticality in the stochastic SIR model for infectious diseases. We adopt the path-integral formalism for the propagation of infections among susceptible, infectious, and removed individuals, and perform the perturbative and nonperturbative analyses to evaluate the critical value of the basic reproduction number ${\cal R}$. In the perturbation theory, we calculate the mean values and the variances of the number of infectious individuals near the initial time, and find that the critical value ${\cal R}_{\text{c}}=1/3$-$2/3$ should be adopted in order to suppress the stochastic spread of infections sufficiently. In the nonperturbative approach, we derive the effective potential by integrating out the stochastic fluctuations, and obtain the effective Euler-Lagrange equations for the time-evolution of the numbers of susceptible, infectious, and removed individuals. From the asymptotic behaviors for a long time, we find that the critical value ${\cal R}_{\text{c}}=2/3$ should be adopted for the sufficient convergence of infections. We also find that the endemic state can be generated dynamically by the stochastic fluctuation which is absent in the conventional SIR model. Those analyses show that the critical value of the basic reproduction number should be less than one, against the usually known critical value ${\cal R}_{\text{c}}=1$, when the stochastic fluctuations are taken into account in the SIR model.