Abstract: This paper is devoted to investigating the spreading speed of a time-space periodic epidemic model with vital dynamics and standard incidence in discrete media. We establish the existence of the leftward and rightward spreading speeds for the infective individuals, which can be used to estimate how fast the disease spreads. To overcome the difficulty arising from the lack of comparison principle for such time-space periodic non-monotone systems, our proof is mainly based on constructing a series of scalar time-space periodic equations, establishing the spreading speeds for such auxiliary equations and using comparison methods. It may be the first work to study the spreading speed for time-space periodic non-monotone systems.

Key words: spreading speed, epidemic models, time-space periodic habitats