Awareness and Movement vs. the Spread of Epidemics - Analyzing a Dynamic Model for Urban Social/Technological Networks

Abstract: We consider the spread of epidemics in technological and social networks. How do people react? Does awareness and cautious behavior help? We analyze these questions and present a dynamic model to describe the movement of individuals and/or their mobile devices in a certain (idealistic) urban environment. Furthermore, our model incorporates the fact that different locations can accommodate a different number of people (possibly with their mobile devices), who may pass the infection to each other. We obtain two main results. First, we prove that w.r.t. our model at least a small part of the system will remain uninfected even if no countermeasures are taken. The second result shows that with certain counteractions in use, which only influence the individuals' behavior, a prevalent epidemic can be avoided. The results explain possible courses of a disease, and point out why cost-efficient countermeasures may reduce the number of total infections from a high percentage of the population to a negligible fraction.