14 DAY TRIAL // At mass gatherings (MG), the risk of infection among participants is extremely great, if just a few people are sick. Using computer models, researchers at the University of Bristol say that they are now capable of understanding how crowds behave. The data could be used to prevent the spread of diseases.
Simulating the crowd movements and behaviors is something that researchers have been striving for for many years. But this line of study is made tremendously difficult by the fact that each individual can act on impulse at any time, rendering modeling efforts obsolete.
Just like sand appears to be a fluid when it's moving, so humans in a mass gathering behave strangely. An overall pattern is not easy to discern. However, understanding how and why this happens is essential for minimizing health hazards.
The most interesting aspect of the new model developed at UB is that it can easily be adapted to simulate the spread of infections through large groups of people. At the same time, it can highlight public health interventions that may have the ability to stop an outbreak dead in its tracks.
Details of the investigation are published in the fourth paper in the Infectious Diseases Series of studies dedicated to mass gathering health. The work is published in the medical journal The Lancet.
In the paper, the team explains how crowd behavior can be identified, analyzed and modeled. These data are then correlated with environmental management techniques, meant primarily to prevent the spread of diseases through the masses.
The investigation was led by UB Department of Civil Engineering scientist Dr. Anders Johansson. He explains that stampedes and other large-scale disasters are the primary cause of injury and death at public gatherings.
“Such models would allow us to test various interventions on a virtual population with a computer and measure their success rates before testing them on real populations, possibly saving both resources and life,” Johansson explains.
He adds that environmental management at public gatherings is essential in order to keep people separated in space and time, even though the very purpose of these meetings is to bring them together.