Abstract

In regard to infectious diseases, socioeconomic determinants are strongly associated with differential exposure and susceptibility however they are seldom accounted for by standard compartmental infectious disease models. These associations are explored with a novel compartmental infectious disease model which, stratified by deprivation and age, accounts for population-level behaviour including social mixing patterns. Using a fully Bayesian approach this model is fitted to the English UKHSA COVID -19 community testing case data. From this UKHSA data it is observed that during the initial period of the pandemic the most deprived groups reported the most cases however this trend reversed after the summer of 2021. The causes underlying this reversal of fortunes are explored using forward simulation experiments given the posterior from the fitted model, specifically both differential depletion of susceptible individuals and differential changes in population level behaviour are considered.