Effects of fear factors in disease propagation

DOI10.1088/1751-8113/44/35/355101zbMATH Open1223.92058arXiv1112.5549OpenAlexW3099818562WikidataQ61910857 ScholiaQ61910857MaRDI QIDQ3173017FDOQ3173017

Gaoxi Xiao, Yubo Wang, Xiuju Fu, Limsoon Wong, Tee Hiang Cheng, Stefan Ma

Publication date: 10 October 2011

Published in: Journal of Physics A: Mathematical and Theoretical (Search for Journal in Brave)

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.

Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/1112.5549

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Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Epidemiology (92D30) Dynamical systems in biology (37N25) Social networks; opinion dynamics (91D30) Mathematical sociology (including anthropology) (91D99)

Cited In (2)

• Temporal percolation of a susceptible adaptive network
• Statistical physics of vaccination

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