Population Growth Modeling of Infectious Diseases Using the SIR Model

by Giovanni de Vivo

Submitted : Fall 2012

With increasing globalization there is a great need to understand the dynamics of how epidemics occur. Not every infectious disease propagates in the same manner due to different methods of transmission, necessity of vectors, environmental factors and so on. However, there is merit in understanding how a mathematical method can model general epidemics such as influenza. The SIR model accomplishes this taking into account several factors such as time, number of people susceptible, infected and recovered as well as basic reproduction.

A sample population with sample parameters was loaded into the formulas which were pre-configured into an excel spreadsheet. The model was ran on the computer, which resulted in an output for susceptible, infected and recovered individuals over a period of 100 days. These can be seen as functions of those individual factors over time as time reaches infinity. The results were as expected as time progresses susceptibility and infection drops while recovery rate increases.

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