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

PEREZ, IGNACIO A.; DI MURO, MATÍAS A.; LA ROCCA, CRISTIAN E.; BRAUNSTEIN, LIDIA A.

Physical Review E

American Physical Society

Año: 2020 vol. 102

2470-0045

The frequent emergence of diseases with the potential to become threats at local and global scales, such asinfluenza A(H1N1), SARS, MERS, and recently COVID-19 disease, makes it crucial to keep designing modelsof disease propagation and strategies to prevent or mitigate their effects in populations. Since isolated systems areexceptionally rare to find in any context, especially in human contact networks, here we examine the susceptible-infected-recovered model of disease spreading in a multiplex network formed by two distinct networks or layers,interconnected through a fraction q of shared individuals (overlap). We model the interactions through weightednetworks, because person-to-person interactions are diverse (or disordered); weights represent the contact timesof the interactions. Using branching theory supported by simulations, we analyze a social distancing strategy thatreduces the average contact time in both layers, where the intensity of the distancing is related to the topology ofthe layers. We find that the critical values of the distancing intensities, above which an epidemic can be prevented,increase with the overlap q. Also we study the effect of the social distancing on the mutual giant component ofsusceptible individuals, which is crucial to keep the functionality of the system. In addition, we find that forrelatively small values of the overlap q, social distancing policies might not be needed at all to maintain thefunctionality of the system.