Please register for the CV & Online Identity Workshop below.

Previous studies based on questionnaires show that individuals often adopt behavioral changes aimed at avoiding or containing an ongoing epidemic if they have some information about the prevalence of the disease among their social contacts. Studying the effect of these local behavioral changes on the spreading of the epidemic is challenging due to the limited availability of real datasets at the individual level. In this talk, we discuss this effect in the genetic sequence data collected during the COVID-19 pandemic, containing millions of samples, which reveal information about the local spreading of the disease. By synthesizing approaches from network science and evolutionary biology, we find that local behavioral changes had vastly different levels of impact in different European countries during the pandemic, and that this impact is correlated with the average stringency index. The talk is based on ongoing work with Márton Karsai.