Abstract
The potential for an infectious disease outbreak that is much worse than those which have been observed in human history, whether engineered or natural, has been the focus of significant concern in biosecurity. Fundamental dynamics of disease spread make such outbreaks much less likely than they first appear. Here we present a slightly modified formulation of the typical SEIR model that illustrates these dynamics more clearly, and shows the unlikely cases where concern may still be warranted. This is then applied to an extreme version of proposed pandemic risk, multi-disease syndemics, to show that (absent much clearer reasons for concern) the suggested dangers are overstated.
The models used in this paper are available here: https://github.com/davidmanheim/Infectious-Disease-Models
Acknowledgements
This paper is based on work done while visiting University of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute. I would like to thank them for the invitation, the incredible atmosphere, and the always-interesting discussion. Thanks to the Bio-risk team, especially Andrew Snyder-Beattie for insight and motivation, and Georgia Ray for her input and background research on syndemics. I would also like to thank Open Philanthropy, especially Claire Zabel, for funding the original research and the visit. Thanks also to Mike Bonsal, Gregory Lewis, and Raffaele Vardavas for their feedback.
Footnotes
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