2.2 Mathematical model

Course subject(s) 2. Improving the model

Mathematical model

When the 20 sick explorers arrived, they infected the 980 Htam people on Ledom Island with the flu. You want to investigate how the resulting flu epidemic might have developed. So, now you construct a mathematical model. (Surprise!)

First define the variables:

$t$ : the time in days after the arrival of the explorers in the 15th century.
$F (t)$ : the number of people infected with the flu.
$X (t) = \frac{F (t)}{1000}$ : the fraction of the infected people relative to the entire population.

Just after the explorers arrived, 2 percent of the population on Ledom Island was sick with the flu, so $X (0) = 0.02$ .

In this model, we will assume that the flu epidemic spreads so quickly, that everyone has been infected before the first people get better again.

Mathematical Modeling Basics by TU Delft OpenCourseWare is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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