Infectious disease model with waning immunity

Research Field: Applied Mathematics, Mathematical Biology, Infectious Disease Modelling

Title: A novel infectious disease model with waning immunity which is computationally fast and explains how infection numbers change with time

I present an infectious disease model for diseases like covid, where people may be reinfected even after vaccination or prior infection. Unlike previous models that require solving differential equations, my model is fast because it only needs values from previous days to find the value on a given day. In addition, I introduce two clocks to keep track of the immunity status, the time since last infection and the time since start of recovery. These clocks turn out to be essential to understand how the number of new infections changes in the long run. My work is inspired by Kermack and McKendrick (1927)’s Susceptible-Infectious-Recovered (SIR) model, the gold standard in infectious disease modelling that is made famous by covid.