Household Epidemics: Modelling Effects of Early Stage Vaccination
No Thumbnail Available
Date
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Wiley
Abstract
Description
A Markovian susceptible - infectious - removed (SIR) epidemic model is considered in a community
partitioned into households. A vaccination strategy, which is implemented during the early
stages of the disease following the detection of infected individuals is proposed. In this strategy, the
detection occurs while an individual is infectious and other susceptible household members are
vaccinated without further delay. Expressions are derived for the influence on the reproduction
numbers of this vaccination strategy for equal and unequal household sizes. We fit previously estimated
parameters from influenza and use household distributions for Sweden and Tanzania census
data. The results show that the reproduction number is much higher in Tanzania (6 compared with 2)
due to larger households, and that infected individuals have to be detected (and household members
vaccinated) after on average 5 days in Sweden and after 3.3 days in Tanzania, a much smaller
difference.
Keywords
Delay time, Epidemic model, Household, Reproduction number, Vaccination strategy