Issue |
EPL
Volume 110, Number 5, June 2015
|
|
---|---|---|
Article Number | 58006 | |
Number of page(s) | 6 | |
Section | Interdisciplinary Physics and Related Areas of Science and Technology | |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1209/0295-5075/110/58006 | |
Published online | 29 June 2015 |
Abrupt transitions from reinfections in social contagions
1 Department of Condensed Matter Physics, University of Zaragoza - E-50009 Zaragoza, Spain
2 Institute for Biocomputation and Physics of Complex Systems, University of Zaragoza E-50018 Zaragoza, Spain
3 Departamento de Física, Instituto Federal da Bahia - 40110-150 Salvador, Brazil
4 Instituto de Fisica, Universidade Federal da Bahia - 400210-340 Salvador, Brazil
Received: 21 April 2015
Accepted: 1 June 2015
The study of social contagion processes is of utmost importance for understanding the emergence of collective social states. Here we introduce reinfections in the Susceptible-Infected-Recovered (SIR) model so to incorporate the possibility that an individual that ceases its activity (recovered) can resume it due to secondary infections from its active (infected) peers. We show that, when primary infection is less frequent than secondary ones, a typical situation in many social contagion processes, the epidemic transition turns from smooth to abrupt. As a consequence, macroscopic collective states can be triggered from the inactive (healthy) regime by a small increment of the primary contagion rate.
PACS: 89.75.Fb – Structures and organization in complex systems / 89.75.Hc – Networks and genealogical trees / 02.50.Ga – Markov processes
© EPLA, 2015
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