A branching random-walk model of disease outbreaks and the percolation backbone

Abstract: The size and shape of the region affected by an outbreak is relevant to understand the dynamics of a disease and help to organize future actions to mitigate similar events. A simple extension of the SIR model is considered, where agents diffuse on a regular lattice and the disease may be transmitted when an infected and a susceptible agents are nearest neighbors. We study the geometric properties of both the connected cluster of sites visited by infected agents (outbreak cluster) and the set of clusters with sites that have not been visited. By changing the density of agents, our results show that there is a mixed-order (hybrid) transition where the region affected by the disease is finite in one phase but percolates through the system beyond the threshold. Moreover, the outbreak cluster seems to have the same exponents of the backbone of the critical cluster of the ordinary percolation while the clusters with unvisited sites have a size distribution with a Fisher exponent $\tau<2$.