The reachability of contagion in temporal contact networks: how disease latency can exploit the rhythm of human behavior

摘要

BackgroundThe symptoms of many infectious diseases influence their host to withdraw from social activity limiting their potential to spread. Successful transmission therefore requires the onset of infectiousness to coincide with a time when the host is socially active. Since social activity and infectiousness are both temporal phenomena, we hypothesize that diseases are most pervasive when these two processes are synchronized.