Thanks for the explanation, Leonardo. Unless I am missing something, I think the main limitation of the approach you describe are:
1) I would still need to use some sort of random number generator to figure out when an outbreak would occur within an iteration (but I think I could work around this), and
2) The approach seems a bit time consuming when each iteration contains hundreds to thousands of timesteps, like in a natural/historical range of variability analysis.
But I look forward to using the approach you describe in shorter runs down the road. Again, thanks for making the time to answer my original question.
-Josh