Title: Anticipating Persistent Infection,
Abstract: We explore the emergence of persistent infection in a closed region where the
disease progression of the individuals is given by the SIRS model, with an
individual becoming infected on contact with another infected individual within
a given range. We focus on the role of synchronization in the persistence of
contagion. Our key result is that higher degree of synchronization, both
globally in the population and locally in the neighborhoods, hinders
persistence of infection. Importantly, we find that early short-time asynchrony
appears to be a consistent precursor to future persistence of infection, and
can potentially provide valuable early warnings for sustained contagion in a
population patch. Thus transient synchronization can help anticipate the
long-term persistence of infection. Further we demonstrate that when the range
of influence of an infected individual is wider, one obtains lower persistent
infection. This counter-intuitive observation can also be understood through
the relation of synchronization to infection burn-out.