A disease can disappear because it's *too* infectious, if people change behavior

This paper models how people changing their behavior can stop a disease. It finds that sometimes, a more infectious disease can disappear entirely if enough people adopt protective behaviors quickly.

For years, disease models have mostly focused on how infectious a pathogen is. This paper suggests that how people react to a disease can be just as important, sometimes even making a highly infectious disease disappear. It means public health modelers might need to rethink how they predict outbreaks.