Ecological modeling framework for interacting contagions

Determine the structure and form of an ecological modeling framework for interacting contagions across biological and social domains that specifies how many simultaneous contagions interact and co-occur at ecosystem scale.

Background

The paper argues that classical contagion models scale poorly when many contagions interact, as state dimensionality grows exponentially with the number of contagions and interactions can occur both within and across hosts. To address this, the authors call for an ecological perspective that treats interacting contagions as an ecosystem.

While they outline possible directions—such as drawing inspiration from food web stability and shifting state variables to growth rates—the authors explicitly state that the appropriate form of this "ecology of contagions" remains undefined, motivating the need to determine a suitable modeling framework.