Effects of fear factors in disease propagation
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 contribu...
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Published in | Journal of physics. A, Mathematical and theoretical Vol. 44; no. 35; pp. 355101 - 15 |
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Main Authors | , , , , , |
Format | Journal Article |
Language | English |
Published |
Bristol
IOP
02.09.2011
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Subjects | |
Online Access | Get full text |
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Summary: | 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 preventing an outbreak from happening. We are motivated to study such effects by adopting a complex network approach. First we evaluate the simple case where connections between individuals are randomly removed due to the 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. |
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Bibliography: | ObjectType-Article-1 SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1 ObjectType-Feature-2 content type line 23 |
ISSN: | 1751-8113 1751-8121 |
DOI: | 10.1088/1751-8113/44/35/355101 |