Risk perception in epidemic modeling - PubMed (original) (raw)

. 2007 Dec;76(6 Pt 1):061904.

doi: 10.1103/PhysRevE.76.061904. Epub 2007 Dec 5.

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Risk perception in epidemic modeling

Franco Bagnoli et al. Phys Rev E Stat Nonlin Soft Matter Phys. 2007 Dec.

Abstract

We investigate the effects of risk perception in a simple model of epidemic spreading. We assume that the perception of the risk of being infected depends on the fraction of neighbors that are ill. The effect of this factor is to decrease the infectivity, that therefore becomes a dynamical component of the model. We study the problem in the mean-field approximation and by numerical simulations for regular, random, and scale-free networks. We show that for homogeneous and random networks, there is always a value of perception that stops the epidemics. In the "worst-case" scenario of a scale-free network with diverging input connectivity, a linear perception cannot stop the epidemics; however, we show that a nonlinear increase of the perception risk may lead to the extinction of the disease. This transition is discontinuous, and is not predicted by the mean-field analysis.

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