Scaling limits of SIR epidemics with vertex-dependent transition rates on complete graphs

Abstract In this paper we are concerned with susceptible–infected–removed (SIR) epidemics with vertex-dependent recovery and infection rates on complete graphs. We show that the hydrodynamic limit of our model is driven by a nonlinear function-valued ordinary differential equation consistent with a mean-field analysis. We further show that the fluctuation of our process is driven by a generalized Ornstein–Uhlenbeck process. A key step in the proofs of the main results is to show that states of different vertices are approximately independent as the population $N\rightarrow+\infty$ .