Flu season: fighting the cascade
http://www.kirksvilledailyexpress.com/news/20161123/flu-season-is-starting-slowly-but-you-still-need-vaccine
It’s getting to be that time of the year, the days get shorter and colder, and everyone finds themselves cooped up inside with each other. All of these are perfect conditions for the spread of illness. There are many precautionary measures that can be taken to help ensure that you yourself do not catch the flu. As discussed in the article, there is a firm correlation between people who wash their hands frequently and get their flu vaccine, and the people who make it through the winter unscathed. We all understand from basic intuition why these data trends occur from a scientific viewpoint, but it is interesting to observe the spread of the flu from a network perspective. In addition to the standard preventative measures one would take, Dorshow-Gordon states “stay at home if you’re sick,” meaning reduce as much contact with healthy people as possible.
In order to analyze this annual spread of disease during flu season, we can choose to model it as a cascade through a network full of healthy people, with those who “adopt” being the people who become sick. Trying to avoid falling ill during cold and flu season is like trying to escape an ever-growing cascade. We learned in class about what would make a person would want to switch over to a different technology, by seeing which percentage of their close friends/neighbors have adopted the new technology. This principle can be used in our analogy to the network of people getting sick, with the neighbors being the people who other people are in close contact with, and the flu is the “new technology.”
So, from a network cascade perspective which we learned from class, how can we give ourselves the best chance of avoiding the cascade and getting sick? The answers are exactly the same as those stated by the article, for reasons you may not have initially realized. Getting vaccinated effectively increases your body’s resistance to the flu, so what this is doing in terms of our cascade is increasing the threshold percentage of neighbors who are ill which will cause you to get sick, because you become more resistant to the virus. This isn’t exactly how it works, but the result is pretty similar, as it would require you to be surrounded by more sick people for you to get sick than it would had you not been vaccinated. This same logic follows for the other preventative measures one would take during flu season (washing hands with warm water, vampire coughing, throwing away tissues, etc.) All of these serve to increase the threshold percentage of sick neighbors which it would take for one to get sick themselves. Another interesting thing that the article suggests is that you should stay at home if you feel sick. By doing this, you are effectively removing the link you have to the other people, and thus removing your effect in the cascade, as you are no longer anyone’s neighbor in the network and will not contribute towards their threshold and possibly getting sick. Thus, it can be said that precautions you take during flu season to not get sick, or get others sick, all follow somewhat closely to our model of technology cascades.