Fig 3. Community transmission profiles and steady states in the absence of vaccination.

Transmission rates as a function of distance from an infectious individual for an inverse transmission profile (left) and exponential transmission profile (right) with community reproductive number R_0C = 0.7 for both profiles. The inverse distance function is $g\left(\eta \right)=\frac{1}{{\eta }^{0.93}}$ and the exponential distance function is f(η) = e^−0.02η for the community size C = 401. B). For this community size and transmission profile parameters, a steady state incidence comparable to that of the 2014–16 Ebola epidemic in Liberia is achieved when simulating epidemics in the absence of vaccination (see Fig 4).