Category: Epidemiology

Summary: Testing whether intermediate stripe-correlated recovery disorder creates long-lived near-critical infection corridors in a 2D contact process.

The contact process is a standard model of spreading with an active-to-absorbing transition. This experiment asks whether making recovery rates spatially disordered in a stripe-correlated way creates channels that let activity persist and spread directionally near the transition more effectively than either uncorrelated disorder or strongly banded extremes.

The simulation runs a two-dimensional contact process with recovery disorder of varying stripe strength and compares survival and directional propagation near criticality. The target is a corridor regime where infection remains active for longer and spreads preferentially along extended low-recovery pathways.

That matters because spatial disorder is often summarized only by its variance, even though geometry can change transport qualitatively. The experiment isolates whether stripe correlation itself widens the near-critical active window.

Method: Repeated 2D contact-process simulations with stripe-correlated recovery disorder, comparing near-threshold survival and directional spread.

What is measured: Survival time, directional spread, corridor persistence, and dependence on stripe correlation versus IID and strongly banded limits.