  Upon an outbreak of a dangerous infectious disease, people generally tend to
reduce their contacts with others in fear of getting infected. Such typical
actions apparently help slow down the spreading of infection. Thanks to today's
broad public media coverage, the fear factor may even contribute to prevent an
outbreak from happening. We are motivated to study such effects by adopting a
complex network approach. Firstly we evaluate the simple case where connections
between individuals are randomly removed due to fear factor. Then we consider a
different case where each individual keeps at least a few connections after
contact reduction. Such a case is arguably more realistic since people may
choose to keep a few social contacts, e.g., with their family members and
closest friends, at any cost. Finally a study is conducted on the case where
connection removals are carried out dynamically while the infection is
spreading out. Analytical and simulation results show that the fear factor may
not easily prevent an epidemic outbreak from happening in scale-free networks.
However, it significantly reduces the fraction of the nodes ever getting
infected during the outbreak.
