New paper out this week in Nature Physics: Macroscopic patterns of interacting contagions are indistinguishable from social reinforcement. We show how models of social contagions could provide effective ways to map and understand the complex dynamics of interacting contagions. Otherwise, we always model outbreaks in a vacuum even when we know most diseases interact directly (biologically, within host) and indirectly (finite resources for treatment and intervention). In the past, coupling models of contagions has given us models whose complexity explodes exponentially, but social contagion as an effective model could fix that. There is a lot more work needed in this area, which is arguably the next big paradigm shift needed in disease modelling. Stay tuned.