Review of the Mean Field Models for Predicting the Spread of Viral Infections

Models for the dynamics and control of disease spread are now developing rapidly and play a central role in making decisions about the introduction of various antiviral measures. One of the approaches to solving such problems may be the use of mean field models, which, on the one hand, allow to take into account some stochastic processes occurring in the population and, on the other hand, are expressed in the form of systems with a small number of equations, the solution of which does not require large computing power. This work is devoted to a review of mean field models now used to solve epidemiological problems, as well as a comparison of four specific approaches that can be formulated within the framework of mean field theory.