  These notes describe stochastic epidemics in a homogenous community. Our main
concern is stochastic compartmental models (i.e. models where each individual
belongs to a compartment, which stands for its status regarding the epidemic
under study : S for susceptible, E for exposed, I for infectious, R for
recovered) for the spread of an infectious disease. In the present notes we
restrict ourselves to homogeneously mixed communities. We present our general
model and study the early stage of the epidemic in chapter 1. Chapter 2 studies
the particular case of Markov models, especially in the asymptotic of a large
population, which leads to a law of large numbers and a central limit theorem.
Chapter 3 considers the case of a closed population, and describes the final
size of the epidemic (i.e. the total number of individuals who ever get
infected). Chapter 4 considers models with a constant influx of susceptibles
(either by birth, immigration of loss of immunity of recovered individuals),
and exploits the CLT and Large Deviations to study how long it takes for the
stochastic disturbances to stop an endemic situation which is stable for the
deterministic epidemic model. The document ends with an Appendix which presents
several mathematical notions which are used in these notes, as well as
solutions to many of the exercises which are proposed in the various chapters.
