Abstract
The aim of this paper is to complement the work of Gómez-Corral et al. [11] on a stochastic epidemic model where healthcare facilities, specifically the number of hospital beds for infectives, are limited. We characterize the probability law of the total time that the hospital ward remains functionally full during an outbreak of the disease. Our methodology is mainly based on the use of sojourn and first-passage times, and related hitting probabilities in a suitably defined absorbing quasi-birth-death process. Numerical examples are presented to illustrate the effects of the person-to-person contact processes and exogenous streams of infection on the dynamics of the epidemic when the occupancy of the hospital ward is maximum.
This work was supported by the Ministry of Science and Innovation (Government of Spain), Project PID2021-125871NB-I00. D Taipe acknowledges the support of Banco Santander and Complutense University of Madrid, Pre-doctoral Researcher Contract CT63/19-CT64/19.
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Gómez-Corral, A., Lopez-Herrero, M.J., Taipe, D. (2023). On a Stochastic Epidemic Model with Limited Number of Hospital Beds. In: Iacono, M., Scarpa, M., Barbierato, E., Serrano, S., Cerotti, D., Longo, F. (eds) Computer Performance Engineering and Stochastic Modelling. EPEW ASMTA 2023 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14231. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43185-2_9
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