We're sorry but this page doesn't work properly without JavaScript enabled. Please enable it to continue.
Feedback

Epidemics in structured communities with social distancing

Formal Metadata

Title
Epidemics in structured communities with social distancing
Title of Series
Number of Parts
19
Author
License
CC Attribution - NonCommercial - NoDerivatives 4.0 International:
You are free to use, copy, distribute and transmit the work or content in unchanged form for any legal and non-commercial purpose as long as the work is attributed to the author in the manner specified by the author or licensor.
Identifiers
Publisher
Release Date
Language

Content Metadata

Subject Area
Genre
Abstract
Consider a large community, structured as a network, in which an epidemic spreads. Infectious individuals spread the disease to each of their susceptible neighbors, independently, at rate λ, and each infectious individual recovers and becomes immune at rate γ. The social distancing is modeled by each susceptible who has an infectious neighbor rewires away this individual to a randomly chosen individual at rate ω. Our main result is surprising and says: the rewiring is rational from an individual perspective in that it reduces the risk of being infected, but at the same time it may be harmful for the community at large since the outbreak may get bigger compared to no rewiring (ω=0).