Pandemics and fear
Epstein and al. use both nonlinear dynamical systems and agent-based computation, to model two interacting contagion processes: one of disease and one of fear of the disease. They find that:
- Scared individuals–whether sick or not–may remove themselves from circulation with some probability, which affects the contact dynamic, and thus the contagion process. If individuals, emboldened by the falling disease incidence, recover from fear and return to circulation prematurely, the coupled dynamics become quite rich, and can include multiple waves of infection. This is what happened with the 1918 Spanish Flu.
- Fear induced flight of few infected people increases not only contagion dramatically, but it also increases the rapidity and geographic scope of the epidemic.
Coupled Contagion Dynamics of Fear and Disease: Mathematical and Computational Explorations
Authors: Joshua M. Epstein, Jon Parker, Derek Cummings, Ross A. Hammond
From: Brookings, Johns Hopkins University
Flattening the curve?
Joshua Gans points out that we can either minimize the short-term (this year’s) cost of the pandemic or minimize the mid-term costs of the pandemic, but not both. He argues that flattening the curve through social distancing is not enough as in reality the health care system capacity is likely much lower than the one necessary to accommodate even the flattened curve.
The alternative: Surf the curve by dramatically increasing health care capacity. In order to do that, governments need to place the military in charge of health care expansion nation-wide, abandon market processes of resource allocation and move to a planned economy.
A War Footing: Surfing the Curve
By: Joshua Gans – University of Toronto
