The spreading of an epidemic depends on the connectivity of the underlying host population. Because of the inherent difficulties in addressing such a problem, research to date on epidemics in networks has focused either on static networks, or networks with relatively few rewirings per timestep. Here we employ a simple, yet highly non-trivial, model of dynamical grouping to investigate the extent to which the underlying dynamics of tightly-knit communities can affect the resulting infection profile. Individual realizations of the spreading tend to be dominated by large peaks corresponding to infection resurgence, and a generally slow decay of the outbreak. In addition to our simulation results, we provide an analytical analysis of the run-averaged behaviour in the regime of fast grouping dynamics. We show that the true run-averaged infection profile can be closely mimicked by employing a suitably weighted static network, thereby dramatically simplifying the level of difficulty. © 2009 ICST Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering.
CITATION STYLE
Zhao, Z., Zhao, G., Xu, C., Hui, P. M., & Johnson, N. F. (2009). Strong dependence of infection profiles on grouping dynamics during epidemiological spreading. In Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social-Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering (Vol. 4 LNICST, pp. 960–970). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-02466-5_96
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