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Modeling Community Resilience for a Post-Epidemic Society

Abstract

The 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa once again reminded the world of the fatal risks of exposure to deadly disease. Commonly evaluated by the number of fatalities estimated during an outbreak, epidemics also have lasting consequences for survivors in the form of community breakdown. Although agent-based models are frequently used to consider the susceptibility of agents to disease and to predict the evolution of epidemics, they rarely attempt to model the interplay of social networks, spatial awareness, and exposure risks. Our response is to construct a model in which agents are instantiated within a social network that influences their movement decisions alongside individually perceived vulnerabilities to exposure-by-contact. We monitor macroscopic behavioral trends and examine community breakdown resulting from fatalities. The model provides an important contribution to modeling social science by exploring individual response to an emerging epidemic and community-level outcomes as a result of those responses.

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