Reproduction numbers for epidemic models with households and other social structures. I. Definition and calculation of R(0)

The basic reproduction number R(0) is one of the most important quantities in epidemiology. However, for epidemic models with explicit social structure involving small mixing units such as households, its definition is not straightforward and a wealth of other threshold parameters has appeared in the literature. In this paper, we use branching processes to define R(0), we apply this definition to models with households or other more complex social structures and we provide methods for calculating it.