Quarantine fatigue thins fat-tailed coronavirus impacts in U.S. cities by making epidemics inevitable

Abstract

We use detailed location data to show that contacts between individuals in most U.S. cities and counties are fat tailed, suggesting that the fat tails documented in a small number of superspreading clusters are widespread. We integrate these results into a stochastic compartmental model to show that COVID-19 cases were also fat tailed for many U.S. cities for several weeks in the spring and summer. Due to epidemiological thresholds, fat-tailed cases would have been more prevalent if not for the gradual increase in contact rates throughout the summer that made outbreaks more certain.

Combining predictive models with future change scenarios can produce credible forecasts of COVID-19 futures

“…to play an important role in the generation and maintenance of persistent heavy tails in the case of COVID-19 (Conte et al (2021)).…”

The dynamical formation of ephemeral groups on networks and their effects on epidemics spreading

“…This spontaneous behavior, seemingly anticipating the decisions of health authorities, has effects that make the epidemic dynamics in the declining part a co-evolutionary process with a rich behavioral component still largely unaccounted in research. Most likely reasons for ephemeral groups formation could be the increasing psychological fatigue in complying with rules of social isolation following a period of compulsory seclusion and deprivation of social gatherings and activities [3][4][5] , distrust in health authorities and decay in risk awareness 6 , socio-economic disparities 7 , or seasonality effects like amenable weather conditions favoring gatherings in public places. It is probably safe to assume that a combination of several factors is at play in what appears in many cases a recurrent pattern: generalized strict social distancing has proved to be unattainable during the declining epidemic phase, even in presence of unsafe contagion rates.…”