Bibliographic record
Abstract
I construct a dynamic social-network model of the COVID-19 epidemic which embeds the SIR epidemiological model onto a graph of person-to-person interactions. The standard SIR framework assumes uniform mixing of infectious persons in the population. This abstracts from important elements of realism and locality: (i) people are more likely to interact with members of their social networks and (ii) health and economic policies can affect differentially the rate of viral transmission via a person's social network vs. the population as a whole. The proposed network-augmented (NSIR) model allows the evaluation, via simulations, of (i) health and economic policies and outcomes for all or subset of the population: lockdown/distancing, herd immunity, testing, contact tracing; (ii) behavioral responses and/or imposing or lifting policies at specific times or conditional on observed states. I find that viral transmission over a network-connected population can proceed slower and reach lower peak than transmission via uniform mixing. Network connections introduce uncertainty and path dependence in the epidemic dynamics, with a significant role for bridge links and superspreaders. Testing and contact tracing are more effective in the network model. If lifted early, distancing policies mostly shift the infection peak into the future, with associated economic costs. Delayed or intermittent interventions or endogenous behavioral responses generate a multi-peaked infection curve, a form of 'curve flattening', but may have costlier economic consequences by prolonging the epidemic duration.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".