Non-Markovian stochastic epidemics in extremely heterogeneous populations

Abstract

A feature often observed in epidemiological networks is significant heterogeneity in degree. A popular modelling approach to this has been to consider large populations with highly heterogeneous discrete contact rates. This paper defines an individual-level non-Markovian stochastic process that converges on standard ODE models of such populations in the appropriate asymptotic limit. A generalised Sellke construction is derived for this model, and this is then used to consider final outcomes in the case where heterogeneity follows a truncated Zipf distribution.