While we’re thinking about infectious disease: how I love the complexity theory boffins at the Santa Fe Institute. This month they’ve been thinking about the role played by fear in how infectious diseases spread, under the glorious title of “Coupled Contagion Dynamics of Fear and Disease“. Here’s the abstract:
We model two interacting contagion processes: one of disease and one of fear of the disease. Individuals can “contract” fear through contact with individuals who are infected with the disease (the sick), infected with fear only (the scared), and infected with both fear and disease (the sick and scared). Scared individuals–whether sick or not–may remove themselves from circulation with some probability, which affects the contact of individuals and thus the disease epidemic proper. If we allow individuals to recover from fear and return to circulation, the coupled dynamics become quite rich, and include multiple waves of infection, such as occurred in the 1918 flu pandemic. We also study flight as a behavioral response. In a spatially extended setting, even relatively small levels of fear-inspired flight can have a dramatic impact on spatio-temporal epidemic dynamics.
In short: freaking out can be a highly constructive component of resilience strategies.
