Talk:Compartmental models in epidemiology

Why does the basic reproductive rate/number have a negative sign in front of it? R_0 is supposed to be positive. Lambda and delta are both positive constants.....

Equation for Final Recovered Number

In the section for the "SIR model without vital dynamics" it seems like

$R_{\infty }=1-S(0)e^{-R_{0}(R_{\infty }-R(0))}$

should be

$R_{\infty }=N-S(0)e^{-R_{0}(R_{\infty }-R(0))}$

since earlier in the section it was stated that

$S(t)+I(t)+R(t)=Constant=N$

opposed to when $N=1$ where

$S(t),I(t),R(t)$

are the proportion of the population that are in that state. KNesHere (talk) 02:10, 10 February 2010 (UTC)

Add labels to diagram.

Adding labels to the red, green, and blue plots would help explain what that plot is showing. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 74.118.13.168 (talk) 03:22, 1 May 2007 (UTC).

The label colors do not match those of the plots. Yellow for Blue is annoying, but reversing the roles of Red and Green is conducive to misunderstanding.

Needs attention of expert

I'm just a layman here, and this may sound an odd question, but how are these formulas used? Just for kicks I tried to make sense of how they might be used in a measuring an outbreak of flu, cholera, or zombies, but all I get is "For the full specification of the model, the arrows should be labeled with the transition rates between compartments." but what does that even mean? An example case or two would be nice. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 205.206.107.136 (talk) 06:29, 21 October 2010 (UTC)

An example of use would be for instance the H1N1 outbreak and the time it took for Governments to get emergency vaccination programs in place. If you wait for too long of a period to vaccinate,a vaccination program may be futile in terms of reducing the total people in the population that gets infected. Other uses may include knowing what demands to expect in Hospital Emergency rooms so that hospitals can staff doctors and nurses accordingly. Back to the H1N1 example in some cities in Canada there was a 2 month delay in the vaccination program that was rolled out, this resulted in a 60% infection of the populations instead what would have been closer to 25%. These models can also tell us what proportion of the population needs to be vaccinated in order to complete eliminate a disease from the population. Some diseases are not virulent enough to exist in populations that are 60% vaccinated against it however there are other diseases that survive in populations with 99% vaccination. These models tell us these things.

The transition rates are how many people at each "time step" move from being susceptible to infected or from infected to recovered. for the ds/dt equation the negative term is the amount of susceptible moving to infected at each time step. You'll notice that the same amount is added to teh di/dt equation. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.225.12.152 (talk) 11:44, 24 November 2010 (UTC)

Needs attention of an expert whose native language is english. The article has lots of grammatical errors - to the point where I'm unable to make sense of a number of statements. --66.41.154.0 (talk) 03:48, 23 September 2014 (UTC)

I've tagged the article. It isn't just that it needs to be rewritten in plain English, some of these changes need to be verified. SW3 5DL (talk) 12:58, 23 October 2014 (UTC)

Need to redo the Bibliography

To make this article accessible, we need to reduce the size of the bibliography. I see a lot of very specific articles that are place there but not used to validate any claims in the main body of the article. I think therefore we should remove those which are not used, and cite some more broad text book resources, or cornerstone research articles in the field.

Thoughts? 149.171.172.161 (talk) 04:46, 21 October 2014 (UTC)

Maybe you could list here the ones you'd remove and add. SW3 5DL (talk) 12:48, 23 October 2014 (UTC)

Have already started, although only have done one for now. 149.171.172.161 (talk) 00:04, 24 October 2014 (UTC)