Uniform weak implies uniform strong persistence for non-autonomous semiflows

It is shown that, under two additional assumptions, uniformly weakly persistent semiflows are also uniformly strongly persistent even if they are non-autonomous. This result is applied to a time-heterogeneous model of S-I-R-S type for the spread of infectious childhood diseases. If some of the parameter functions are almost periodic, an almost sharp threshold result is obtained for uniform strong endemicity versus extinction.