Description:
It is known that the distributions of the latent and infectious periods affect the dynamics
of the spread of an infectious disease. Here we consider the SEIR epidemic
model describing the spread of an infectious disease giving life-long immunity in a
community whose social structure can be represented by a simple random graph
having a pre-specified degree distribution. Two real time vaccination strategies,
based on tracing and vaccinating the friends of infectious individuals during the
early stages of an epidemic, are proposed. The first strategy considers vaccination
of each friend of a detected infectious individual independently with probability ρ.
The second strategy sets an upper bound on the number of friends an individual
can infect before being detected. We derive both the basic reproduction number
and the strategy-specific reproduction numbers and show that these reproduction
numbers decrease when the variances of the infectious period and the time to detection
increase. Under the assumption that detection may only occur after the latent
period, the reproduction numbers are independent of the distribution of the latent
period.