Instruct: Identify the main and secondary category of Arxiv papers based on the titles and abstracts
Query: Individual preventive measures during an epidemic may have negative
  population-level outcomes   The outbreak of an infectious disease in a human population can lead to
individuals responding with preventive measures in an attempt to avoid getting
infected. This leads to changes in contact patterns. However, as we show in
this paper, rational behaviour at the individual level, such as social
distancing from infectious contacts, may not always be beneficial for the
population as a whole. We use epidemic network models to demonstrate the
potential negative consequences at the population level. We take into account
the social structure of the population through several network models. As the
epidemic evolves, susceptible individuals may distance themselves from their
infectious contacts. Some individuals replace their lost social connections by
seeking new ties. We show that social distancing can worsen the disease outcome
both in the initial phase of an outbreak and the final epidemic size. Moreover,
the same negative effect can arise in real-world networks. Our results suggest
that one needs to be careful when targeting behavioural changes as they could
potentially worsen the epidemic outcome. Furthermore, network structure
crucially influences the way that individual-level measures impact the epidemic
at the population level. These findings highlight the importance of careful
analysis of preventive measures in epidemic models.

26
The categories of this paper are: bayes-an
16
The categories of this paper are: stat
21
The categories of this paper are: adap-org
20
The categories of this paper are: acc-phys
11
The categories of this paper are: hep-lat
30
The categories of this paper are: q-alg
1
The categories of this paper are: cs
13
The categories of this paper are: quant-ph
15
The categories of this paper are: nucl-ex
37
The categories of this paper are: supr-con
32
The categories of this paper are: atom-ph
3
The categories of this paper are: physics
35
The categories of this paper are: mtrl-th
8
The categories of this paper are: hep-ex
17
The categories of this paper are: q-fin
34
The categories of this paper are: chem-ph