Bi-SIS Epidemics on Graphs - Quantitative Analysis of Coexistence Equilibria

We consider a system in which two viruses of the Susceptible-Infected-Susceptible (SIS) type compete over general, overlaid graphs. While such systems have been the focus of many recent works, they have mostly been studied in the sense of convergence analysis, with no existing results quantifying the non-trivial coexistence equilibria (CE) - that is, when both competing viruses maintain long term presence over the network. In this paper, we prove monotonicity of the CE with respect to effective infection rates of the two viruses, and provide the first quantitative analysis of such equilibria in the form of upper bounds involving spectral radii of the underlying graphs, as well as positive equilibria of related single-virus systems. Our results provide deeper insight into how the long term infection probabilities are affected by system parameters, which we further highlight via numerical results.