Effects of fear factors in disease propagation

TL;DR

This paper investigates how fear-induced contact reduction affects disease spread in networks, revealing that while it may not prevent outbreaks in scale-free networks, it significantly lowers the total number of infected individuals.

Contribution

It introduces a complex network model to analyze the impact of fear factors on epidemic dynamics, including static and dynamic contact reduction scenarios.

Findings

Fear reduces overall infection size in networks.

Prevents outbreaks more effectively in some network types.

Dynamic contact reduction still allows outbreaks in scale-free networks.

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 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.