A transmission model for a disease with some fatalities.

A stochastic epidemic model which allows some infected individuals to die from the disease is considered. The model includes the general epidemic and the fatal disease model as particular cases. A set of iterative equations is derived from which the probability distribution of the final size of the epidemic can be computed. It is illustrated that the fatal disease model is distinct in that it results in nearly all or hardly anyone being infected in a large population. An easily computed estimator for a key parameter of the model is derived and it is illustrated that it has good efficiency relative to the maximum likelihood estimator, which is very tedious to compute.