A unified framework of immunological and epidemiological dynamics for the spread of viral infections in a simple network-based population

Our compartmental formulation parsimoniously demonstrates a correlation between immune responsiveness, network connectivity, and the natural history of infection in a population. It suggests that an increased disparity between people's ability to respond to an infection, while maintaining an average immune responsiveness rate, may worsen the overall impact of an outbreak within a population. Additionally, varying an individual's network connectivity affects the rate with which the population-wide viral load accumulates, but has little impact on the asymptotic limit in which it approaches. Whilst the clearance of a pathogen in a population will lower viral loads in the short-term, the longer the time until re-infection, the more severe an outbreak is likely to be. Given the eventual likelihood of reinfection, the resulting long-run viral burden after elimination of an infection is negligible compared to the situation in which infection is persistent.Future infectious disease research would benefit by striving to not only continue to understand the properties of an invading microbe, or the body's response to infections, but how these properties, jointly, affect the propagation of an infection throughout a population. These initial results offer a refinement to current immuno-epidemiological modelling methodology, and reinforce how coupling principles of immunology with epidemiology can provide insight into a multi-scaled description of an ecological system. Overall, we anticipate these results to as a further step towards articulating an integrated, more refined epidemiological theory of the reciprocal influences between host-pathogen interactions, epidemiological mixing, and disease spread.Epidemics consist of dynamic processes at multiple biological scales. From host-pathogen interactions to host-host interactions infectious diseases have had a major influence on the development of our immune systems and the evolution of human ecology [1,2]. In recent decades, remar