Physics – Physics and Society
Scientific paper
2011-12-23
J. Phys. A: Math. Theor. 44 (2011) 355101
Physics
Physics and Society
19 pages, 10 figures
Scientific paper
10.1088/1751-8113/44/35/355101
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.
Cheng Tee Hiang
Fu Xiuju
Ma Stefan
Wang Yubo
Wong Limsoon
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