A STOCHASTIC DISTRIBUTED-DELAY MODEL OF DISEASE PROCESSES IN DYNAMIC POPULATIONS

1A simulation model that is applicable to infectious and non-infectiou s disease is proposed. This paper describes a model for simulation of infectious and non-infectious disease processes in dynamic populations , and compares its behavior to a stochastic version of the Reed-Frost model for a hypothetical infectious disease. A distributed-delay model is applied. Monte-Carlo simulations of both modeling approaches produ ced epidemics of randomly determined sizes. Although both models demon strated the characteristic bimodal distributions of total number of ca ses per epidemic, the shape of the distributions was slightly differen t. Separation between the two peaks was not as great with the distribu ted-delay model as with the Reed-Frost model. The tail was slightly mo re extended than the Reed-Frost, and there were more epidemics in the 50-100 case range. Both models produced similar average attack rates.