Effects of fear factors in disease propagation
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Publication:3173017
Abstract: Upon an outbreak of a dangerous infectious disease, people generally tend to reduce their contacts with others in fear of getting infected. Such typical actions apparently help slow down the spreading of infection. Thanks to today's broad public media coverage, the fear factor may even contribute to prevent an outbreak from happening. We are motivated to study such effects by adopting a complex network approach. Firstly we evaluate the simple case where connections between individuals are randomly removed due to fear factor. Then we consider a different case where each individual keeps at least a few connections after contact reduction. Such a case is arguably more realistic since people may choose to keep a few social contacts, e.g., with their family members and closest friends, at any cost. Finally a study is conducted on the case where connection removals are carried out dynamically while the infection is spreading out. Analytical and simulation results show that the fear factor may not easily prevent an epidemic outbreak from happening in scale-free networks. However, it significantly reduces the fraction of the nodes ever getting infected during the outbreak.
Recommendations
- The spread of awareness and its impact on epidemic outbreaks
- How the individuals' risk aversion affect the epidemic spreading
- The influence of awareness on epidemic spreading on random networks
- The impact of awareness on epidemic spreading in networks
- Modeling the influence of information on the coevolution of contact networks and the dynamics of infectious diseases
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