Disease extinction in the presence of non-Gaussian noise

Abstract

We investigate stochastic extinction in an epidemic model and the impact of random vaccinations in large populations. We show that, in the absence of vaccinations, the effective entropic barrier for extinction displays scaling with the distance to the bifurcation point, with an unusual critical exponent. Even a comparatively weak Poisson-distributed vaccination leads to an exponential increase in the extinction rate, with the exponent that strongly depends on the vaccination parameters.