Papers › How contact patterns destabilize and modulate epidemic outbreaks
How contact patterns destabilize and modulate epidemic outbreaks
Johannes Zierenberg, F. Paul Spitzner, Jonas Dehning, Viola Priesemann, Martin Weigel, Michael Wilczek
The archive published only this paper's code-link row. Authors, date and abstract are from arXiv's metadata (CC0), read from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12 where its title matched the archive's; the title is the archive's.
The spread of a contagious disease clearly depends on when infected individuals come into contact with susceptible ones. Such effects, however, have remained largely unexplored in the study of epidemic outbreaks. In particular, it remains unclear how the timing of contacts interacts with the latent and infectious stages of the disease. Here, we use real-world physical proximity data to study this interaction and find that the temporal statistics of actual human contact patterns i) destabilize epidemic outbreaks and ii) modulate the basic reproduction number. We explain both observations by distinct aspects of the observed contact patterns. On the one hand, we find the destabilization of outbreaks to be caused by temporal clustering of contacts leading to over-dispersed offspring distributions and increased probabilities of otherwise rare events (zero- and super-spreading). Notably, our analysis enables us to disentangle previously elusive sources of over-dispersion in empirical offspring distributions. On the other hand, we find the modulation of R0 to be caused by a periodically varying contact rate. Both mechanisms are a direct consequence of the memory in contact behavior, and we showcase a generative process that reproduces these non-Markovian statistics. Our results point to the importance of including non-Markovian contact timings into studies of epidemic outbreaks.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections