Social adaptive behavior and oscillatory prevalence in an epidemic model on evolving random geometric graphs

Abstract

Our recent experience with the COVID-19 pandemic amply shows that spatial effects like the mobility of agents and average interpersonal distance, together with the adaptation of agents, are very important in deciding the outcome of epidemic dynamics. Structural and dynamical aspects of random geometric graphs are widely employed in describing processes with a spatial dependence, such as the spread of an airborne disease. In this work, we investigate the interplay between spatial factors, such as agent mobility and average interpersonal distance, and the adaptive responses of individuals to an ongoing epidemic within the framework of random geometric graphs. We show that such spatial factors, together with the adaptive behavior of the agents in response to the prevailing level of global epidemic, can give rise to oscillatory prevalence even with the classical SIR framework. We characterize in detail the effects of social adaptation and mobility of agents on the disease dynamics and obtain the threshold values. We also study the effects of delayed adaptive response of agents on epidemic dynamics. We show that a delay in executing non-pharmaceutical spatial mitigation strategies can amplify oscillatory prevalence tendencies and can have non-linear effects on peak prevalence. This underscores the importance of early implementation of adaptive strategies coupled with the dissemination of real-time prevalence information to manage and control the epidemic effectively.