Seasonal variation in environmental variables, and in rates of contact among individuals, are fundamental drivers of infectious disease dynamics. Unlike most periodically-forced physical systems, for which the precise pattern of forcing is typically known, underlying patterns of seasonal variation in transmission rates can be estimated approximately at best, and only the period of forcing is accurately known. In this paper, we demonstrate that model predictions are less sensitive than expected to the detailed pattern of forcing, and we conjecture that this robustness of predictions might be a feature of many other periodically forced dynamical systems.

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