The Reed–Frost model is a mathematical model of epidemics put forth in the 1920s by Lowell Reed and Wade Hampton Frost, of Johns Hopkins University.
[1][2] While originally presented in a talk by Frost in 1928 and used in courses at Hopkins for two decades, the mathematical formulation was not published until the 1950s, when it was also made into a TV episode.
[3] During the 1920s, mathematician Lowell Reed and physician Wade Hampton Frost developed a binomial chain model for disease propagation, used in their biostatistics and epidemiology classes at Johns Hopkins University.
[4] It was not until 1950 that mathematical formulation was published and turned into a television program entitled Epidemic theory: What is it?.
[3] In the program, Lowell Reed, after explaining the formal definition of the model, demonstrates its application through experimentation with marbles of different colors.
The model is also based on the law of mass action, so that an infection rate at a given time was proportional to the number of susceptible and infectious ones at that time.
It is effective for moderately large populations, but it does not take into account multiple infections that come into contact with the same individual.
Therefore, in small populations, the model greatly overestimates the number of susceptibles that become infected.
[5][2][6] Reed and Frost modified the Soper model to account for the fact that only one new case would be produced if a particular susceptible includes contact with two or more cases.
[7] The Reed-Frost model has been widely used and served as the basis for the development of more detailed disease propagation simulation studies.
It was formulated by Lowell Reed and Wade Frost in 1928 (in unpublished work) and describes the evolution of an infection in generations.
[11]The Reed–Frost model is based on the following assumptions:[12] The following parameters are set initially: With this information, a simple formula allows the calculation of how many individuals will be infected, and how many immune, in the next time interval.
This is repeated until the entire population is immune, or no infective individuals remain.
The model can then be run repeatedly, adjusting the initial conditions, to see how these affect the progression of the epidemic.
The probability of adequate contact corresponds roughly with R0, the basic reproduction number – in a large population when the initial number of infecteds is small, an infected individual is expected to cause
represent the number of cases of infection at time
Assume all cases recover or are removed in exactly one time-step.
represent the number of susceptible individuals at time
Making use of the random-variable multiplication convention, we can write the Reed–Frost model as
The deterministic limit is (found by replacing the random variables with their expectations),