Excerpt from Network Pages:
In this article we discuss how, during a pandemic, actions and interactions can have a huge impact on a big part of a population in a very short time. “Your actions can have an effect on someone you don’t know!” “Try and reduce your movements and interactions!”
We’ve heard phrases like these multiple times over the past year. During the last months, a lot of experts have appeared in the media discussing the medical and scientific aspects of the coronavirus. Typical examples of concepts you may have read about are the Basic and Effective Reproduction Number, or the widely used Susceptible-Infected-Recovered mathematical model used to predict how the virus will spread in the short term (S-I-R model). A crucial component in many of these discussions is the term contact. In different countries, the virus followed different paths and it is natural to wonder how the connectivity, in the sense of who-comes-in-contact-with-whom, of the individuals in the population, affects this spread. Commuting every day to work, traveling to distant destinations, visiting friends in other cities are habits we are rather used to. When you go to the supermarket or take public transport, you share space with people who might be total strangers to you. Modern societies are very interconnected, maybe more interconnected than we think. How does this connectivity play a role in a pandemic? Let’s have a look into this.
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