Pathways to explosive transitions in interacting contagion dynamics

TL;DR

This paper develops a framework to understand how interactions between multiple contagion processes can lead to explosive epidemic transitions, revealing conditions that promote or suppress such phenomena.

Contribution

It introduces a tunable model coupling epidemic and social contagion processes, uncovering new pathways and conditions for explosive transitions in interacting contagion dynamics.

Findings

First-order transitions from mutual cooperation of epidemics

Explosive transitions driven by social contagions

Negative feedback loops can suppress explosive phenomena

Abstract

Yet often neglected, dynamical interdependencies between concomitant contagion processes can alter their intrinsic equilibria and bifurcations. A particular case of interest for disease control is the emergence of explosive transitions in epidemic dynamics coming from their interactions with other simultaneous processes. To address this problem, here we propose a framework coupling a standard epidemic dynamics with another contagion process, presenting a tunable parameter shaping the nature of its transitions. Our model retrieves well-known results in the literature, such as the existence of first-order transitions arising from the mutual cooperation of epidemics or the onset of explosive transitions when social contagions unidirectionally drive epidemics. We also reveal that negative feedback loops between simultaneous dynamical processes might suppress explosive phenomena, thus increasing systems robustness against external perturbations. Our results render a general perspective towards finding different pathways to explosive phenomena from the interaction of contagion processes.