It is argued that the (quasi-) mechanistic modelling of the incidence of an infectious disease in a population of varying size is a nontrivial problem, deserving careful thinking. The spread of a virus among seals is used to illustrate how a submodel for the contact process may be helpful. In that same context the impact of the disease on the population growth of the host is investigated.
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Diekmann et al. (1995) studied this question.