SIS Epidemic Model Birth-and-Death Markov Chain Approach

We are interested in describing the dynamics of the infected size of the SIS Epidemic model using the Birth-Death Markov process. The Susceptible-Infected-Susceptible (SIS) model is defined within a population of constant size $M$; the size is kept constant by replacing each death with a newborn healthy individual. The life span of each individual in the population is modelled by an exponential distribution with parameter $\alpha$; the disease spreads within the population is modelled by a Poisson process with a rate $\lambda_{I}$. $\lambda_{I}=\beta I(1-\frac{I}{M}) $ is similar to the instantaneous rate in the logistic population growth model. The analysis is focused on the disease outbreak, where the reproduction number $R=\frac{\beta} {\alpha} $ is greater than one. As methodology, we use both numerical and analytical approaches. The numerical approach shows that the infected size dynamics converge to a stationary stochastic process. And the analytical results determine the distribution of the stationary stochastic process as a normal distribution with mean $(1-\frac{1}{R}) M$ and Variance $\frac{M}{R} $ when $M$ becomes larger.