Non-Markovian modelling reveals differences in reinfection rates between leaky and polarised immunity, suggesting implications for epidemiological outcomes.
Mathematical models tend to oversimplify the biological details of vaccine or infection-derived immunity effectiveness. [0pc][-1pc]Please check and confirm the corresponding authors have been correctly identified amend if necessary.Yet, epidemiological outcomes may diverge when assuming polarised immunity-individuals are either fully susceptible or completely immune-compared to leaky immunity-where all individuals are partially protected. We explore the differences between the two by taking advantage of a non-Markovian framework, which allows us to explicitly record the 'age' of the immunity and vary its effectiveness accordingly. A basic scenario reveals that leaky immunity leads to a shorter time between reinfections. A more data-driven scenario based on SARS-CoV-2 data finds that leaky immunity yields substantially more reinfections than polarised immunity and a higher number of infected individuals, yet with a lower probability of hospitalisation. Our findings emphasize the critical role of immune memory modelling assumptions, especially for long-term epidemiological dynamics and public health policies.
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Reyné et al. (2025) studied this question.
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