Related papers: How contact patterns destabilize and modulate epid…
To understand the contact patterns of a population -- who is in contact with whom, and when the contacts happen -- is crucial for modeling outbreaks of infectious disease. Traditional theoretical epidemiology assumes that any individual can…
It is well known that behavioral changes in contact patterns may significantly affect the spread of an epidemic outbreak. Here we focus on simple endemic models for recurrent epidemics, by modelling the social contact rate as a function of…
We present a stochastic epidemic model to study the effect of various preventive measures, such as uniform reduction of contacts and transmission, vaccination, isolation, screening and contact tracing, on a disease outbreak in a…
Global strategies to contain a pandemic, such as social distancing and protective measures, are designed to reduce the overall transmission rate between individuals. Despite such measures, essential institutions, including hospitals,…
The structure of sexual contacts, its contacts network and its temporal interactions, play an important role in the spread of sexually transmitted infections. Unfortunately, that kind of data is very hard to obtain. One of the few…
Network--based epidemic models that account for heterogeneous contact patterns are extensively used to predict and control the diffusion of infectious diseases. We use census and survey data to reconstruct a geo--referenced and…
In an increasingly interconnected world, a key scientific challenge is to examine mechanisms that lead to the widespread propagation of contagions, such as misinformation and pathogens, and identify risk factors that can trigger large-scale…
When a new infectious disease (or a new strain of an existing one) emerges, as in the recent COVID-19 pandemic, different types of mobility restrictions are considered to slow down or mitigate the spread of the disease. The measures to be…
In the first part of this paper, we review old and new results about the influence of host population heterogeneity on (various characteristics of) epidemic outbreaks. In the second part we highlight a modelling issue that so far has…
We considered a model for an infectious disease outbreak, when the depletion of susceptible individuals is negligible, and assumed that individuals adapt their behavior according to the information they receive about new cases. In line with…
Records of social interactions provide us with new sources of data for understanding how interaction patterns affect collective dynamics. Such human activity patterns are often bursty, i.e., they consist of short periods of intense activity…
The spreading of epidemics is very much determined by the structure of the contact network, which may be impacted by the mobility dynamics of the individuals themselves. In confined scenarios where a small, closed population spends most of…
We investigate the impact of misinformation about the contact structure on the ability to predict disease outbreaks. We base our study on 31 empirical temporal networks and tune the frequencies in errors in the node identities or timestamps…
Understanding how epidemics spread in a system is a crucial step to prevent and control outbreaks, with broad implications on the system's functioning, health, and associated costs. This can be achieved by identifying the elements at higher…
Contacts between individuals serve as pathways where infections may propagate. These contact patterns can be represented by network structures. Static structures have been the common modeling paradigm but recent results suggest that…
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…
The long-term evolution of epidemic processes depends crucially on the structure of contact networks. As empirical evidence indicates that human populations exhibit strong community organization, we investigate here how such mesoscopic…
The outbreak of an infectious disease in a human population can lead to individuals responding with preventive measures in an attempt to avoid getting infected. This leads to changes in contact patterns. However, as we show in this paper,…
Most previous studies of epidemic dynamics on complex networks suppose that the disease will eventually stabilize at either a disease-free state or an endemic one. In reality, however, some epidemics always exhibit sporadic and recurrent…
When controlling an emerging outbreak of an infectious disease it is essential to know the key epidemiological parameters, such as the basic reproduction number $R_0$ and the control effort required to prevent a large outbreak. These…