Approximate solution to the speed of spreading viruses -: art. no. 031909

Recently, it has been shown that the speed of virus infections can be explained by time-delayed reaction-diffusion [J. Fort and V. Mendez, Phys. Rev. Lett. 89, 178101 (2002)], but no analytical solutions were found. Here we derive formulas for the front speed, valid in appropriate limits. We also integrate numerically the evolution equations of the system. There is good agreement with both numerical and experimental speeds.