Scientists sometimes compare predicting the course of epidemics to forecasting the weather.
But there’s a major difference — the impact of human behavior — says Alessandro Vespignani, director of Northeastern University’s Network Science Institute.
Consider what happens during a downpour, he says. “If we all open an umbrella, it will rain anyway.”
“In epidemics, if we all open the umbrella in the sense that we behave differently, the epidemic will spread differently,” Vespignani says. “If we are more risk averse, we might avoid places. We might wash our hands more and so on and so forth.”
That makes modeling the interplay between human behavior and infectious disease transmission one of the remaining key challenges in epidemiology, according to a paper Vespignani and colleagues published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
“It’s very difficult to integrate behavior in the models,” especially since existing behavioral models often lack real-world data calibration, says Vespignani, Northeastern’s Sternberg Family Distinguished Professor.
But now, thanks to what they learned during COVID-19, researchers say they have found a solution.
Read more at Northeastern Global News.
Photo by Matthew Modoono/Northeastern University
