How oscillations in SIRS epidemic models are affected by the distribution of immunity times

TL;DR

This paper investigates how the distribution of immunity durations affects oscillations in SIRS epidemic models, revealing that broader immunity times lead to sinusoidal outbreaks and identifying multiple stable limit cycles with different bifurcation mechanisms.

Contribution

It introduces a step-function-like immunity time distribution into SIRS models and analyzes the resulting phase diagram and oscillatory behaviors, including multiple stable limit cycles.

Findings

Broader immunity steps induce sinusoidal oscillations.

Uniform immunity distributions cause sharper outbreaks.

Two distinct stable limit cycles can coexist with different bifurcation origins.

Abstract

Models for resident infectious diseases, like the SIRS model, may settle into an endemic state with constant numbers of susceptible ($S$), infected ($I$) and recovered ($R$) individuals, where recovered individuals attain a temporary immunity to reinfection. For many infectious pathogens, infection dynamics may also show periodic outbreaks corresponding to a limit cycle in phase space. One way to reproduce oscillations in SIRS models is to include a non-exponential dwell-time distribution in the recovered state. Here, we study a SIRS model with a step-function-like kernel for the immunity time, mapping out the model's full phase diagram. Using the kernel series framework, we are able to identify the onset of periodic outbreaks when successively broadening the step-width. We further investigate the shape of the outbreaks, finding that broader steps cause more sinusoidal oscillations while more uniform immunity time distributions are related to sharper outbreaks occurring after extended periods of low infection activity. Our main results concern recovery distributions characterized by a single dominant timescale. We also consider recovery distributions with two timescales, which may be observed when two or more distinct recovery processes co-exist. Surprisingly, two qualitatively different limit cycles are found to be stable in this case, with only one of the two limit cycles emerging via a standard supercritical Hopf bifurcation.