Networksir and Environmentalsir: Two Simple Distributed Mechanisms for Modeling Epidemics

The recent COVID-19 pandemic and its management has highlighted a need for new and innovative approaches to modeling epidemics. This thesis seeks to address some of those needs by providing a new framework for modeling disease using a distributed, network based approach, dubbed NetworkSIR. It then illustrates the potentials of this model by extending it to allow for disease to spread through the environment rather than exclusively personto-person contact. This is of note as all known network-based epidemic models consider only the case in which infection spreads through direct human-to-human contact, or host-tohuman contact. As “superspreader” events often result from disease spreading through poor environmental conditions, EnvironmentalSIR, while simple, delivers a powerful advantage over traditional modeling techniques by being able to capture these events