The Paradox of Neglecting Changes in Behavior: How Standard Epidemic Models Misestimate Both Transmissibility and Final Epidemic Size

2025-12-08 epidemiology Title + abstract only

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During epidemic outbreaks, populations adapt their behavior in response to disease burden, fundamentally altering transmission dynamics. Despite this, most compartmental models assume constant contact rates throughout outbreaks. To quantify biases from this assumption, we fitted a baseline SEIRD model with constant transmission and three behavioral variants--incorporating mortality-driven transmission reduction via exponential, rational, and mixed functional forms--to COVID-19 mortality data fro...

The Paradox of Neglecting Changes in Behavior: How Standard Epidemic Models Misestimate Both Transmissibility and Final Epidemic Size

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