When recovery from the disease is impossible, a situation captured by the SI model, the population will never become disease-free again once it acquires at least one infected individual. The Markov chain that represents such diseases therefore has another absorbing state, corresponding to networks where everyone has been infected, besides the previous one in which no one is infected. The time to reach this state again depends on the presence of information. When information prevails, susceptible individuals manage to resist infection for a long time, thereby delaying the rapid progression of the disease, as shown in the inset of Figure 4B . Naturally, the average number of generations needed to reach a fully infected population increases with the availability of information, as illustrated in the main panel of Figure 4B .