3 ms·
At a super fundamental level, epidemics take place on a social graph. In a well connected graph spread will be exponential, but depending on graph shape it coul
by im3w1l 6y ago
At a super fundamental level, epidemics take place on a social graph. In a well connected graph spread will be exponential, but depending on graph shape it could be something else.
In particular you could imagine that if people never venture outside their own block that the social network is an euclidean graph. In an ideal case where people are evenly spaced in the plane and only interact with neighbors, the disease would spread as a circle expanding outwards, so total infections would be proportional to ~ t^2, and current infections ~ t.
- biomcgary 6y agoYou are essentially describing a supersized plaque assay (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virus_quantification#Plaque_assay https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virus_quantification#Plaque_as...).
- dTal 6y agoI'm perplexed why anyone would downvote this comment; it seems very interesting and insightful to me.
- Fomite 6y agoI'm perplexed as well. That the perfect mixing models most people think of for infectious diseases are an imperfect approximation of the actual dynamics on a graph is well known in epidemiology.