Figure 1

Effects of vaccination coverage and clustering of immunity on the control of measles epidemics. For each combination of vaccination coverage V and the level of immunity clustering Ω (all other parameters’ values are shown in Table 1), we ran 256 iterations to obtain the outbreak size and the uncontrolled outbreak probability in 365 simulated days. The combinations with which the simulated uncontrolled outbreak probabilities >0 are represented by red cells and scaled from light red (lower uncontrolled outbreak probability) to dark red (higher uncontrolled outbreak probability); the values of simulated uncontrolled outbreak probabilities are shown in red cells. The combinations without uncontrolled outbreaks (the simulated uncontrolled outbreak probabilities =0) are shown by blue cells and scaled from light blue (higher outbreak size) to dark blue (lower outbreak size); the values of simulated outbreak sizes are shown in blue cells. The frontiers between adjacent combinations with and without uncontrolled outbreaks are shown by the black lines. These simulations suggest that the vaccination coverage is important in the control of measles epidemics (the higher vaccination coverage, the lower the probability of uncontrolled measles outbreaks and the smaller outbreak size); for a given vaccination coverage, a lower level of immunity clustering (i.e., the lower the chance of unvaccinated individuals clustered together in a household) may have better control of measles epidemics.