Controlling distant contacts to reduce disease spreading on disordered complex networks

PEREZ, IGNACIO A.; TRUNFIO, PAUL A.; LA ROCCA, CRISTIAN E.; BRAUNSTEIN, LIDIA A.

PHYSICA A - STATISTICAL AND THEORETICAL PHYSICS

ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV

Año: 2020 vol. 545

0378-4371

In real social networks, person-to-person interactions are known to beheterogeneous, which can affect the way a disease spreads through apopulation, reaches a tipping point in the fraction of infectedindividuals, and becomes an epidemic. This property, calledemph{disorder}, is usually associated with contact times betweenindividuals and can be modeled by a weighted network, where theweights are related to normalized contact times $omega$. In thispaper, we study the SIR model for disease spreading when both close anddistant types of interactions are present. We develop amitigation strategy that reduces only the time duration of distantcontacts, which are easier to alter in practice. Using branchingtheory, supported by simulations, we found that the effectiveness ofthe strategy increases when the density $f_1$ of close contactsdecreases. Moreover, we found a threshold $ilde{f}_1 = T_c / eta$below which the strategy can bring the system from an epidemic to anon-epidemic phase, even when close contacts have the longest timedurations.