A century of transitions in New York City's measles dynamics

Abstract

Infectious diseases spreading in a human population occasionally exhibit sudden transitions in their qualitative dynamics. Previous work has successfully predicted such transitions in New York City's historical measles incidence using the seasonally forced susceptible–infectious–recovered (SIR) model. This work relied on a dataset spanning 45 years (1928–1973), which we have extended to 93 years (1891–1984). We identify additional dynamical transitions in the longer dataset and successfully explain them by analysing attractors and transients of the same mechanistic epidemiological model.