A lattice-based model of rotavirus epidemics

The cyclic recurrence of childhood rotavirus epidemics in unvaccinated populations provides one of the best documented phenomena in population dynamics and can become a paradigm for epidemic studies. Herein we analyse the monthly incidence of rotavirus infection from the city of Melbourne, Australia during 1976–2003. We show that there is an inverse nonlinear relationship of the cumulative distribution of the number of cases per month in a log–log plot. It is also shown that the rate of transmission of rotavirus infection follows a symmetric distribution centered on zero. A wavelet phase analysis of rotavirus epidemics is also carried out. We test the hypothesis that rotavirus dynamics could be a realization of a forest-fire model with sparks and with immune trees. Some statistical properties of this model turn out to be similar to the above results of actual rotavirus data.