Complexity Science Project 1
In Gomez and Verdu’s paper Network theory may explain the vulnerability of medieval human settlements to the Black Death pandemic. They model infection patterns in Europe and Asia due to the plague and find that hub cities are reinfected more frequently. We extended this work by adding a quarantine response to examine how the spread of the diseases is impacted by varying responses. We also examine the result of quarantining only hub cities. To do this we removed nodes from our network according to various quarantine rates. We find that quarantining hub cities prevents a larger number of cities from being infected on a per city quarantined basis when the transmission rate is low but has less of an overall impact due to the small number of hubs.