Spatial epidemics and local times for critical branching random walks in dimensions 2 and 3

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Abstract: The behavior at criticality of spatial SIR (susceptible/infected/recovered) epidemic models in dimensions two and three is investigated. In these models, finite populations of size N are situated at the vertices of the integer lattice, and infectious contacts are limited to individuals at the same or at neighboring sites. Susceptible individuals, once infected, remain contagious for one unit of time and then recover, after which they are immune to further infection. It is shown that the measure-valued processes associated with these epidemics, suitably scaled, converge, in the large-N limit, either to a standard Dawson-Watanabe process (super-Brownian motion) or to a Dawson-Watanabe process with location-dependent killing, depending on the size of the the initially infected set. A key element of the argument is a proof of Adler's 1993 conjecture that the local time processes associated with branching random walks converge to the local time density process associated with the limiting super-Brownian motion.


The main aim of the paper under review is to show that spatial susceptible/infected/recovered epidemics (SIR) in dimensions two and three exhibit critical thresholds as in the well-known one-dimensional case. The main result of the authors states that under suitable hypotheses on the initial configurations of the infected individuals, the critical spatial SIR-\(d\) epidemic for both \(d=2,3\) can be rescaled so as to converge to a Dawson-Watanabe measure-valued diffusion process (or often called super Brownian motion). Depending on the size of the initially infected set, the limiting Dawson-Watanabe measure-valued diffusion process has either a positive location-dependent killing rate or no killing at all. A similar result for dimension \(d=1\) was proved by the first author of this paper [Spatial epidemics: critical behavior in one dimension. Probab. Theory Relat. Fields 144, No. 3-4, 429--469 (2009; Zbl 1181.92073)].



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