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To: accountclosed who wrote (55156)	1/7/2001 8:17:02 PM
From: Wyätt Gwyön	Respond to of 436258

From Irrational Exuberance by Robert Schiller, pp. 158-159 (emphasis added): "If the removal rate is greater than the infection rate, then the epidemic will never get started and never even be observed. "Epidemiologists use these models constructively to understand the pattern of disease outbreaks. Using these models they can infer, for example, that if the removal rate is just above the infection rate, then a nearly healthy population is in danger of an epidemic, for any small uptick in the infection rate or downtick in the removal rate can tip the balance toward a new epidemic. Thus epidemiologists can infer that a change in weather patterns that will tend to keep people indoors together (where they are move likely to infect each other) may cause the infection rate to increase above the removal rate. The epidemic will then begin, but the absolute number of infectives will grow slowly at first. If, in this example, the weather changes fairly soon again in such a way that the infection rate is brought back down, so that the number of infectives never becomes very large, then the epidemic will fail to be noticed by the general public. But if the bad weather lingers long enough relative to the difference between the bad-weather-infection rate and the removal rate, then the epidemic will become large and noticeable in the population at large. Epidemiologists can use this model to predict, according to this example, how long a spell of bad weather is necessary to produce a serious epidemic."