Complex Sciences. First International Conference, Complex 2009, Shanghai, China, February 23-25, 2009, Revised Papers, Part 2

Research Article

A Preliminary Study on the Effects of Fear Factors in Disease Propagation

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  • @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
Yubo Wang1, Jie Hu1, Gaoxi Xiao1,*, Limsoon Wong2, Stefan Ma3, Tee Cheng1
  • 1: Nanyang Technology University
  • 2: National University of Singapore
  • 3: Ministry of Health
*Contact email: egxxiao@ntu.edu.sg

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.