A Cultural Network Approach for Amending Covid-19 Policy

This papers develops four amendments to current COVID-19 public health policy using a cultural network approaches to community dynamics. As social scientists, we do not claim to be health experts or epidemiologists, but, based on our knowledge and the materials examined in this paper, we maintain that policymakers would benefit from: 1) interventions aimed at flattening the curve that take into account differences in social dynamics across communities by incorporating local social unit network interactions; 2) turning their attention to specific city and community dynamics to help them customize public health interventions; 3) looking downstream from the “hammer” phase to the “dance” phase of contagion to consider how interactions in and across communities may play into, or help undercut, the second wave; and 4) crafting directives and information provisions that take into account (and build off) both shared rumors and rational information search by social groups. We bolster these claims with a mix of historical examples from the Spanish Flu Epidemic, current case examples in the media on health portals concerning the COVID-19 Crisis, and a crude simulation of cultural network contagion, on which our group has begun work. We wish to share our evolving paper as early as possible in the hopes that some readers will find it useful and customize their own work – and policies – around COVID-19 accordingly.