Research Article
A Preliminary Study on the Effects of Fear Factors in Disease Propagation
@INPROCEEDINGS{10.1007/978-3-642-02469-6_19, author={Yubo Wang and Jie Hu and Gaoxi Xiao and Limsoon Wong and Stefan Ma and Tee Cheng}, title={A Preliminary Study on the Effects of Fear Factors in Disease Propagation}, proceedings={Complex Sciences. First International Conference, Complex 2009, Shanghai, China, February 23-25, 2009, Revised Papers, Part 2}, proceedings_a={COMPLEX PART 2}, year={2012}, month={5}, keywords={complex networks scale-free networks fear factor epidemic threshold average outbreak size prevalence size}, doi={10.1007/978-3-642-02469-6_19} }- Yubo Wang
Jie Hu
Gaoxi Xiao
Limsoon Wong
Stefan Ma
Tee Cheng
Year: 2012
A Preliminary Study on the Effects of Fear Factors in Disease Propagation
COMPLEX PART 2
Springer
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-02469-6_19
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 to reduce the outbreak size. Thanks to today’s broad media coverage, the fear factor may also contribute to preventing an outbreak from happening at all. We are motivated to conduct a careful study on modeling and evaluating such effects with a complex network approach. As a first step of this study, we consider the relatively simple case where involved individuals randomly remove a certain fraction of links between them. Analytical and simulation results show that such an action cannot effectively prevent an epidemic outbreak from happening. However, it may significantly reduce the fraction of all the people ever getting infected when an outbreak does happen.