We consider a stochastic model for the spread of an epidemic among a population of n individuals that are equally spaced around a circle. Throughout its infectious period, a typical infective, i say, makes global contacts, with individuals chosen independently and uniformly from the whole...

This paper is concerned with the approximation of early stages of epidemic processes by branching processes. A general model for an epidemic in a closed, homogeneously mixing population is presented. A construction of a sequence of such epidemics, indexed by the initial number of susceptibles N,...