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Community dynamics generates complex epidemiology through self-induced amplification and suppression

Zhenyuan Zhao¹, Juan Pablo Calderon², Chen Xu³, Pak Ming Hui³ & Neil Johnson¹

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1. University of Miami, Physics, USA
2. Universidad de Los Andes, Bogota, Colombia
3. The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin

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Manuscript

Date:

Received 02 July 2008 00:51 UTC; Posted 03 July 2008

Subjects:

Ecology

Tags:

• collective social phenomena
• Complex Networks
• dynamics
• epidemiology

Abstract:

The development of quantitative models of outbreaks is key to their eventual control, from human and computer viruses through to social (and antisocial) activities. Standard epidemiological models can reproduce many general features of outbreaks. Unfortunately, the large temporal fluctuations which often dominate real-world data are thought to require more complicated, system-specific models involving super-spreaders, specific social network topologies and rewirings, and birth-death processes. However we show here that these large fluctuations have a generic explanation in terms of underlying community dynamics. Communities increasing (or decreasing) in size, act as instantaneous amplifiers (or suppressors) yielding a complex temporal evolution whose features vary dramatically according to the relative timescales of the community dynamics. We uncover, and provide an analytic theory for, a novel epidemiological phase transition driven by the population's response to an outbreak. An imminent epidemic will be suppressed if individual communities start to break up more frequently or join together less frequently, but will be amplified if the reverse is true.

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This document is licensed to the public under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License

How to cite this document:

Zhao, Zhenyuan, Calderon, Juan Pablo, Xu, Chen, Hui, Pak Ming, and Johnson, Neil. Community dynamics generates complex epidemiology through self-induced amplification and suppression. Available from Nature Precedings <http://hdl.handle.net/10101/npre.2008.2030.1> (2008)

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