Controlling distant contacts to reduce disease spreading on disordered complex networks

Abstract

Disorder is a characteristic of real social networks generated by heterogeneity in person-to-person interactions. This property affects the way a disease spreads through a population, reaches a tipping point in the fraction of infected individuals, and becomes an epidemic. Disorder is usually associated with contact times between individuals, and normalized contact time values ω are taken from the distribution P (ω) = 1/(aω) that mimics "face-to-face" experiments [1,2]. To model more realistic systems, we study how heterogeneity in person-to-person interactions affects the spreading of diseases when two different kinds of disorder are present, each with a particular value of a. This allows two different types of interaction to emerge, such as close (family, coworkers) and distant (neighbors, strangers) contacts. We also develop a strategy for controlling distant contact times, which are easier to alter in practice, so as to reduce the total number of infected individuals.Finally, we use "face-to-face" experiments to generate a more accurate distribution of normalized contact times, and we repeat the analysis for this distribution.

Estratégias para Alocação de Recursos de Controle Ótimo em Cenários Estocásticos

“…Os modelos em rede complexas representam cada indivíduo como um nó e a relação entre um ou mais indivíduos como arestas. Além das diversas ferramentas que a teoria dos grafos proporciona para obtenção de informações na rede, os modelos baseados em redes permitem representar heterogeneidades individuais, diferentes topologias e outras características que os tornam ainda mais flexíveis que os modelos citados anteriormente [Nowzari et al 2016, Perez et al 2019.…”

Disease spreading with social distancing: A prevention strategy in disordered multiplex networks

“…On the other hand, there is a group of strategies less severe than quarantine and lockdown but in the same spirit. "Social distancing" strategies [25][26][27][28][29][30][31] are a set of actions intended to reduce contact between individuals (shorten the interaction times, maintain a minimum physical distance, avoid crowded places, etc.) with the aim of decreasing the probability of disease transmission.…”

“…These kinds of systems are known as disordered networks, which are characterized by the existing diversity in the strength or intensity of the interactions among the different parts of the system. Disordered networks have been receiving much attention recently [8,28,30,31]. In Ref.…”

“…In Ref. [31] disorder is implemented using a weighted complex network [8], in which the weights associated with links represent the normalized contact times ω of the interaction between two individuals. These contact times follow a powerlaw distribution, W (ω) = 1/(aω), that resembles experimental results [6,34,35].…”