English

Firewalls, Disorder, and Percolation in Epidemics

Statistical Mechanics 2007-05-23 v1 Populations and Evolution

Abstract

We consider a spatial model related to bond percolation for the spread of a disease that includes variation in the susceptibility to infection. We work on a lattice with random bond strengths and show that with strong disorder, i.e. a wide range of variation of susceptibility, patchiness in the spread of the epidemic is very likely, and the criterion for epidemic outbreak depends strongly on the disorder. These results are qualitatively different from those of standard models in epidemiology, but correspond to real effects.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.cond-mat/0106450,
  title  = {Firewalls, Disorder, and Percolation in Epidemics},
  author = {C. P. Warren and L. M. Sander and I. M. Sokolov},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cond-mat/0106450},
  year   = {2007}
}

Comments

4 pages, 4 figures

R2 v1 2026-07-22T10:23:26.284Z