Why are incubation periods like stamp collections?
The incubation periods of completely unrelated diseases all show a lognormal distribution; a simple mathematical model now reveals why.
When one child goes to school with a throat infection, many of his or her classmates will often start to come down with a sore throat after two or three days. A few of the children will get sick sooner, the very next day, while others may take about a week. As such, there is a distribution of incubation periods — the time from exposure to illness — across the children in the class.
When plotted on a graph, the distribution of incubation periods is not the normal bell curve. Rather the curve looks lopsided, with a long tail on the right. Plotting the logarithms of the incubation periods, however, rather than the incubation periods themselves, does give a normal distribution. As such, statisticians refer to this kind of curve as a “lognormal distribution”. Remarkably, many other, completely unrelated, diseases — like typhoid fever or bladder cancer — also have approximately lognormal distributions of incubation periods. This raised the question: why do such different diseases show such a similar curve?
Working with a simple mathematical model in which chance plays a key role, Ottino-Löffler et al. calculate how long it takes for a bacterial infection or cancer cell to take over a network of healthy cells. The model explains why a lognormal-like distribution of incubation periods, modeled as takeover times, is so ubiquitous. It emerges from the random dynamics of the incubation process itself, as the disease-causing microbe or mutant cancer cell competes with the cells of the host.
Intuitively, this new analysis builds on insights from the “coupon collector’s problem”: a classical problem in mathematics that describes the situation where a person collects items like baseball cards, stamps, or cartoon monsters in a videogame. If a random item arrives every day, and the collector’s luck is bad, they may have to wait a long time to collect those last few items. Similarly, in the model of Ottino-Löffler et al., the takeover time is dominated by dramatic slowdowns near the start or end of the infection process. These effects lead to an approximately lognormal distribution, with long waits, as seen in so many diseases.
Ottino-Löffler et al. do not anticipate that their findings will have direct benefits for medicine or public health. Instead, they believe their results could help to advance basic research in the fields of epidemiology, evolutionary biology and cancer research. The findings might also make an impact outside biology. The term “contagion” has now become a familiar metaphor for the spread of everything from computer viruses to bank failures. This model sheds light on how long it takes for a contagion to take over a network, for a variety of idealized networks and spreading processes.
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