Two sides of the same coin: Euler-Lotka and R0

KaanÖcal

University of Melbourne

"Two sides of the same coin: Euler-Lotka and R0"

Two fundamental quantities in population biology, the reproductive number R0 and the growth rate, are intimately linked, but the exact nature of their relationship is somewhat obscure. Models of microbial growth typically have R0=2, but estimating their growth rate, and hence fitness, requires solving the famous Euler-Lotka equation. Conversely, in epidemiology one typically measures how quickly the infected population grows, but it is the reproductive number R0 that sets the threshold for an epidemic breakout and for herd immunity. In this talk, we use statistical techniques based on large deviations theory to clarify how exactly the population growth rate and R0 are connected. Building an analogy to classical thermodynamics, we show that the long-term behaviour of a population is encoded in a single convex function that relates growth rate, R0, and the statistics of intergeneration times in lineages. As an application, we derive a general formulation of the Euler-Lotka equation and explain why it is almost always appears as an implicit equation.
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