Cp. Farrington et Ad. Grant, The distribution of time to extinction in subcritical branching processes:Applications to outbreaks of infectious disease, J APPL PROB, 36(3), 1999, pp. 771-779
We consider the distribution of the number of generations to extinction in
subcritical branching processes, with particular emphasis on applications t
o the spread of infectious diseases. We derive the generation distributions
for processes with Bernoulli, geometric and Poisson offspring, and discuss
some of their distributional and inferential properties. We present applic
ations to the spread of infection in highly vaccinated populations, outbrea
ks of enteric fever, and person-to-person transmission of human monkeypox.
AMS 1991 Subject Classification: Primary 60J80 Secondary 62M05.