Abstract
In this note we show how to derive, by a mechanistic argument, an expression for the saturating contact rate of individual contacts in a population that mixes randomly. The main assumption is that the individual interaction times are typically short as compared to the time-scale of changes in, for example, individual-type, but that the interactions yet make up a considerable fraction of the time-budget of an individual. In special cases an explicit formula for the contact rate is obtained. The result is applied to mathematical epidemiology and marriage models.
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Heesterbeek, J.A.P., Metz, J.A.J. The saturating contact rate in marriage- and epidemic models. J. Math. Biol. 31, 529–539 (1993). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00173891
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00173891