The effect of heterogeneous distributions of social norms on the spread of infectious diseases

Abstract

The emergence due to the outbreak of the COVID-19 disease, caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, suddenly erupted at the beginning of 2020 in China and soon spread worldwide. This has caused an outstanding increase on research about the virus itself and, more in general, epidemics in many scientific fields. In this work we focus on the dynamics of the epidemic spreading and how it can be affected by the individual variability in compliance with social norms, i.e., in the adoption of health and hygienic social norms by population's members.

A critical review on applications of the Avrami equation beyond materials science

“…Though the JMAK model was developed to describe the progress of phase transformation in a material system, its application has not been limited to materials science. The model has been used in other fields of research, including life sciences examples such as oncology [35][36][37][38][39][40], ecology [41][42][43][44][45] and epidemiology [46][47][48][49][50]. Some systems from those contexts can be regarded as undergoing a 'phase transformation', and non-thermodynamic driving forces analogous to undercooling and supersaturation can be identified.…”

“…Vilone & Andrighetto [ 50 ] used the Avrami equation to include the time-dependence of the infection rate in modelling the infected population during an epidemic's initial period. While they introduce the Avrami equation as a phase transition model, they seem to suggest this model merely as a mathematical tool, without any parameter interpretation in epidemiology.…”

“…This issue has been discussed previously [ 90 ] regarding application of the Avrami model in absorption processes [ 91 ]. The same issue is apparent in some epidemiology literature where the Avrami equation is used simply as a sigmoidal fit to COVID-19 pandemic data, without justification of the model parameters [ 47 – 50 ].…”