Seasonally forced disease dynamics explored as switching between attractors (Q5927625)

Temporal forcing, stochasticity and nonlinearity are key factors common to many biological systems. The authors examine how these three factors interact to produce a range of complicated dynamics on the example of models of childhood diseases. These models incorporate seasonal variation in contact rates due to the increased mixing during school terms compared to school holidays. The nature of the seasonal forcing results in dynamics can be explained as switching between two nonlinear spiral sinks. The authors investigate the stability of attractors to understand the interaction between the deterministic dynamics and demographic and environmental stochasticity.