Ergodicity and hydrodynamic limits for an epidemic model

Abstract

We consider two approaches to study the spread of infectious diseases within a spatially structured population distributed in social clusters. According whether we consider only the population of infected individuals or both populations of infected individuals and healthy ones, two models are given to study an epidemic phenomenon. Our first approach is at a microscopic level, its goal is to determine if an epidemic may occur for those models. The second one is the derivation of hydrodynamics limits. By using the relative entropy method we prove that the empirical measures of infected and healthy individuals converge to a deterministic measure absolutely continuous with respect to the Lebesgue measure, whose density is the solution of a system of reaction-diffusion equations.