Polynomial epidemics and clustering in contact networks

2004/06/04 by Balázs Szendröi, Gábor Csányi, Gábor Cśanyi +2 · 1 citation
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Physics and Astronomy · Social Sciences · #Complex Network Analysis Techniques #Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation #FOS: Biological sciences #Opinion Dynamics and Social Influence #Populations and Evolution (q-bio.PE) #q-bio.PE

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.q-bio/0406013

arxiv created 2004/06/04 · openalex publication_date 2004/06/04 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

It is widely known that the spread of the HIV virus was slower than exponential in several populations, even at the very beginning of the epidemic. We show that this implies a significant reduction in the effective reproductive rate of the epidemic, and describe a general mechanism, related to the clustering properties of the disease transmission network, capable of explaining this reduction. Our considerations provide a new angle on polynomial epidemic processes, and may have implications for the choice of strategy against such epidemics.

Citations

• Emergence of scaling in random networks
• The Mathematics of Infectious Diseases

Cited by

• Epidemic reproduction numbers in spatial networks

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