Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2011 Feb 25;11 Suppl 1(Suppl 1):S3.
doi: 10.1186/1471-2458-11-S1-S3.

A simple model for behaviour change in epidemics

Fred Brauer  1
Affiliations

A simple model for behaviour change in epidemics

Fred Brauer. BMC Public Health. .

Abstract

Background: People change their behaviour during an epidemic. Infectious members of a population may reduce the number of contacts they make with other people because of the physical effects of their illness and possibly because of public health announcements asking them to do so in order to decrease the number of new infections, while susceptible members of the population may reduce the number of contacts they make in order to try to avoid becoming infected.

Methods: We consider a simple epidemic model in which susceptible and infectious members respond to a disease outbreak by reducing contacts by different fractions and analyze the effect of such contact reductions on the size of the epidemic. We assume constant fractional reductions, without attempting to consider the way in which susceptible members might respond to information about the epidemic.

Results: We are able to derive upper and lower bounds for the final size of an epidemic, both for simple and staged progression models.

Conclusions: The responses of uninfected and infected individuals in a disease outbreak are different, and this difference affects estimates of epidemic size.

PubMed Disclaimer

References

    1. Bootsma MCJ, Ferguson NM. The effect of public health measures on the 1918 influenza pandemic in U.S. cities. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2007;104(18):7588–7593. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0611071104. - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Brauer F. Age-of-infection and the final size relation. Math Biosci Eng. 2008;5(4):681–690. doi: 10.3934/mbe.2008.5.681. - DOI - PubMed
    1. Brauer F, Castillo-Chavez C, Feng Z. Discrete epidemic models. Math Biosci Eng. 2010;7(1):1–15. doi: 10.3934/mbe.2010.7.1. - DOI - PubMed
    1. del Valle S, Hethcote HW, Hyman JM, Castillo-Chavez C. Effects of behavioral changes in a smallpox attack model. Math Biosci. 2005;195(2):228–251. doi: 10.1016/j.mbs.2005.03.006. - DOI - PubMed
    1. Kermack WO, McKendrick AG. A contribution to the mathematical theory of epidemics. Proc. Royal Soc. London. 1927;115:700–721. doi: 10.1098/rspa.1927.0118. - DOI

MeSH terms

LinkOut - more resources