Towards a quantitative reduction of the SIR epidemiological model

Abstract

Motivated by our intention to use SIR-type epidemiological models in the context of dynamic networks as provided by large-scale highly interacting inhomogeneous human crowds, we investigate in this framework possibilities to reduce the classical SIR model to a representative evolution model for a suitably chosen observable. For selected scenarios, we provide practical {\em a priori} error bounds between the approximate and the original observables. Finally, we illustrate numerically the behavior of the reduced models compared to the original ones.