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Cited by 536

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 39 of the 39 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Social network-based distancing strategies to flatten the COVID-19 curve in a post-lockdown world

Open access
Block, Per, Hoffman, Marion, Raabe, Isabel J., Dowd, Jennifer Beam, Rahal, Charles, Kashyap, Ridhi, Mills, Melinda C.·2020·Nature Human Behaviour
DOI 10.1038/s41562-020-0898-6
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Abstract

Social distancing and isolation have been widely introduced to counter the COVID-19 pandemic. Adverse social, psychological and economic consequences of a complete or near-complete lockdown demand the development of more moderate contact-reduction policies. Adopting a social network approach, we evaluate the effectiveness of three distancing strategies designed to keep the curve flat and aid compliance in a post-lockdown world. These are: limiting interaction to a few repeated contacts akin to forming social bubbles; seeking similarity across contacts; and strengthening communities via triadic strategies. We simulate stochastic infection curves incorporating core elements from infection models, ideal-type social network models and statistical relational event models. We demonstrate that a strategic social network-based reduction of contact strongly enhances the effectiveness of social distancing measures while keeping risks lower. We provide scientific evidence for effective social distancing that can be applied in public health messaging and that can mitigate negative consequences of social isolation. Fusing models from epidemiology and network science, Block et al. show how to ease lockdown and slow infection spread by strategic modification of contact through seeking similarity, strengthening communities and repeating interaction in bubbles.

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Metadata

Authors
Block, P., Hoffman, M., Raabe, I. J., Dowd, J. B., Rahal, C., Kashyap, R., & Mills, M. C.
Venue
Nature Human Behaviour
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Published
2020-06-04
Volume
4
Issue
6
Pages
588-596
ISSN
2397-3374 (ISSN-L)
DOI
10.1038/s41562-020-0898-6
OpenAlex
W3017364177
Cited by
536
References
39
FWCI
17.14
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
hybrid

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Social network-based distancing strategies to flatten the COVID-19 curve in a post-lockdown world. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1038/s41562-020-0898-6
The paper
Block, P., Hoffman, M., Raabe, I. J., Dowd, J. B., Rahal, C., Kashyap, R., & Mills, M. C. (2020). Social network-based distancing strategies to flatten the COVID-19 curve in a post-lockdown world. Nature Human Behaviour. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-020-0898-6

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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.