From bee species aggregation to models of disease avoidance: The Ben-Hur effect

TL;DR

This paper explores how behavioral responses to contagion, such as aggregation or avoidance, influence disease spread and spatial distribution, using models inspired by historical and recent outbreaks.

Contribution

It introduces models that incorporate behavioral avoidance and aggregation in disease dynamics, highlighting their potential impact on infection clustering.

Findings

Behavioral responses can lead to clustering of infections.

Models show potential for density-dependent aggregation or avoidance.

Preliminary results suggest behavior significantly influences disease spatial patterns.

Abstract

The movie Ben-Hur highlights the dynamics of contagion associated with leprosy, a pattern of forced aggregation driven by the emergence of symptoms and the fear of contagion. The 2014 Ebola outbreaks reaffirmed the dynamics of redistribution among symptomatic and asymptomatic or non-infected individuals as a way to avoid contagion. In this manuscript, we explore the establishment of clusters of infection via density-dependence avoidance (diffusive instability). We illustrate this possibility in two ways: using a phenomenological driven model where disease incidence is assumed to be a decreasing function of the size of the symptomatic population and with a model that accounts for the deliberate movement of individuals in response to a gradient of symptomatic infectious individuals. The results in this manuscript are preliminary but indicative of the role that behavior, here modeled in crude simplistic ways, may have on disease dynamics, particularly on the spatial redistribution of epidemiological classes.