A simple stochastic lattice gas model for influenza spreading

We construct a very simple epidemic model for influenza spreading in an age-class–distributed population, by coupling a lattice gas model for the population dynamics with a SIR stochastic model for susceptible, infected and removed/immune individuals. We use as a test case the age-distributed Italian epidemiological data for the novel influenza A(H1N1). The most valuable features of this model are its country-independent and virus-independent structure (few demographic, social and virological data are used to fix some parameters), its large statistic due to a very short run-time machine, and its easy generalizability to include mitigation strategies. In spite of its simplicity, the model presented reproduces the epidemiological Italian data, with sensible predictions for the reproduction number and theoretically interesting results for the generation time distribution.