Suppression of epidemic outbreaks with heavy-tailed contact dynamics

2013/03/31 by Byungjoon Min, K. -I. Goh, K.-I. Goh +2
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Mathematics · Medicine · Physics and Astronomy · #COVID-19 epidemiological studies #Complex Network Analysis Techniques #Contact dynamics #Contact process (mathematics) #Dynamics (music) #Mathematical and Theoretical Epidemiology and Ecology Models #Outbreak #Process (computing) #cond-mat.stat-mech #physics.soc-ph #q-bio.PE

paper · pdf · doi:10.1209/0295-5075/103/50002

published as EPL 103, 50002 (2013) · 5 pages, 3 figures

openalex publication_date 2013/09/01 · arxiv created 2013/10/08 · arxiv updated 2013/10/09 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05

Abstract

We study the epidemic spreading process following contact dynamics with heavy-tailed waiting time distributions. We show both analytically and numerically that the temporal heterogeneity of contact dynamics can significantly suppress the disease's transmissibility, hence the size of epidemic outbreak, obstructing the spreading process. Furthermore, when the temporal heterogeneity is strong enough, one obtains the vanishing transmissibility for any finite recovery time and regardless of the underlying structure of contacts, the condition of which was derived.

Citations

• Small but slow world: How network topology and burstiness slow down spreading
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