The effect of heterogeneous distributions of social norms on the spread of infectious diseases

TL;DR

This paper investigates how variations in social norm compliance among individuals influence the spread of infectious diseases, using epidemic modeling to understand the impact of heterogeneous social behaviors.

Contribution

It introduces a model that accounts for individual differences in adherence to social norms and analyzes their effect on epidemic dynamics.

Findings

Heterogeneous social norm compliance significantly affects disease spread.

Models incorporating social variability better predict epidemic outcomes.

Insights can inform targeted public health interventions.

Abstract

The emergence due to the outbreak of the COVID-19 disease, caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, suddenly erupted at the beginning of 2020 in China and soon spread worldwide. This has caused an outstanding increase on research about the virus itself and, more in general, epidemics in many scientific fields. In this work we focus on the dynamics of the epidemic spreading and how it can be affected by the individual variability in compliance with social norms, i.e., in the adoption of health and hygienic social norms by population's members.