Demographic and behavioural change during epidemics

Demographic and behavioural change during epidemics

The speed and range of epidemic spreading is strongly influenced by the topology and dynamics of the relevant transmission network. This is, however, not a uni-directional relationship. The mutual interaction between epidemic spreading and the evolution of the transmission network is described within a new mathematical framework by a closed set of partial differential equations. This allows to ...

Homo-psychologicus: Reactionary behavioural aspects of epidemics.

We formulate an in silico model of pathogen avoidance mechanism and investigate its impact on defensive behavioural measures (e.g., spontaneous social exclusions and distancing, crowd avoidance and voluntary vaccination adaptation). In particular, we use SIR(B)S (e.g., susceptible-infected-recovered with additional behavioural component) model to investigate the impact of homo-psychologicus asp...

Demographic Change and Transport

Cultural innovations and demographic change.

Demography plays a large role in cultural evolution through its effects on the effective rate of innovation. If we assume that useful inventions are rare, then small isolated societies will have low rates of invention. In small populations, complex technology will tend to be lost as a result of random loss or incomplete transmission (the Tasmanian effect). Large populations have more inventors ...

Critical care during epidemics

We recommend several actions that could improve hospitals' abilities to deliver critical care during epidemics involving large numbers of victims. In the absence of careful pre-event planning, demand for critical care services may quickly exceed available intensive care unit (ICU) staff, beds and equipment, leaving the bulk of the infected populace without benefit of potentially lifesaving crit...