Coexistence and noncoexistence of Markovian viruses and their hosts

Abstract

Examining possibilities for the coexistence of two competing populations is a classic problem which dates back to the earliest `predator-prey' models. In this paper we study this problem in the context of a model introduced in Björnberg et al. (2012) for the spread of a virus infection in a population of healthy cells. The infected cells may be seen as a population of `predators' and the healthy cells as a population of `prey'. We show that, depending on the parameters defining the model, there may or may not be coexistence of the two populations, and we give precise criteria for this.