Demographic processes

Simulating Epidemics with Birth and Death rates

Welcome to the latest post of the Epidemic Modeling series. In this post, we go beyond constant population and start modeling the striking effects that demographic processes (natural birth and death rates) can have on epidemic spreading.

If you would like a quick refresher before we get started, check out our previous posts in this series (especially the first 2):

1. Epidemic Modeling 101: Or why your CoVID19 exponential fits are wrong

2. All CoVID-19 models are wrong, but some are useful

3. Adding confidence intervals and stochastic effects to your CoVID-19 Models

4. Impact of Seasonal effects on CoVID-19

5. Competing CoVID-19 Strains

6. Network Structure, Super-spreaders and Contact Tracing

7. Network Models, the effect of degree correlations

8. How to model the effects of vaccination

9. The Impact of Age Structure on Epidemic Spreading

10. Meta-population Models

In all the models we have considered so far, we have kept the total population constant by making sure that all transitions between compartments balanced out. For e…