Abstract
In an epidemic of a serious disease, there is likely to be behavioral response that decreases the epidemic size considerably, and taking this into account may lead to estimates of the final epidemic size that are much smaller and more realistic than estimates that do not take this into account.
Highlights
Keyword Epidemic models · Final size relations · Behavioral response. It has been standard practice in analyzing disease outbreaks to formulate a dynamical system as a deterministic compartmental model, to use observed early outbreak data to fit parameters to the model, and to analyze the dynamical system to predict the course of the disease outbreak and to compare the effects of different management strategies
We suggest that an assumption of a contact rate that decreases in time, because of behavioral response to an outbreak of a disease that is often fatal, is a very plausible assumption
For an epidemic that may spread very widely, an estimate based on a simple SIR or SEIR model may predict a very large number of disease cases
Summary
It has been standard practice in analyzing disease outbreaks to formulate a dynamical system as a deterministic compartmental model, to use observed early outbreak data to fit parameters to the model, and to analyze the dynamical system to predict the course of the disease outbreak and to compare the effects of different management strategies Such models predict an initial stochastic stage (while the number of infectious individuals is small), followed by a period of exponential growth. During the SARS epidemic of 2002–2003 many people began to wear face masks to try to prevent disease spread through contact with airborne particles, even though this may have been counter-productive Another example of a behavioral response is given by the Great Plague in the village of Eyam near Sheffield, England, which suffered an outbreak of bubonic plague in 1665–1666, the source of which is generally believed to be the Great Plague of London. The quarantine could do nothing to prevent the travel of rats and did little to prevent the spread of disease to other communities
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