Figure 3

The impact of a person's immune responsiveness for the short-term dynamics of an outbreak. (A and B) A comparison between the immune responsiveness and the overall behaviour of an outbreak (A), as well as the overall severity an outbreak (B), as measured by the mean and accumulated viral load in the population, respectively. Mean and accumulated viral loads were computed from simulating our basic model for constant values of immune responsiveness: c _i = 0.001 (blue line), 0.01 (red line), 0.1 (yellow line), and random uniformly distributed (black line). (C) Assuming that the population is composed of an equal proportion of stronger c _i = 0.1 and weaker responders c _i = 0.016, the model was simulated to study the effect on the accumulated viral load in the population by starting the infection in the sub-population of stronger responders (red line) and weaker responders (blue line). These experiments demonstrate no clear correlation between viral load and starting an infection in either strong or weak responders. For scenarios (A, B, and C) the connectivity coefficient, ω _i , was a stochastic random variable. All other parameter values were based on values presented by Wodarz and colleagues [4] and are displayed in Table 1.