IFIMAR   20926
INSTITUTO DE INVESTIGACIONES FISICAS DE MAR DEL PLATA
Unidad Ejecutora - UE
artículos
Título:
Intermittent social distancing strategy for epidemic control
Autor/es:
LUCAS D. VALDEZ; P. A. MACRI; L. A. BRAUNSTEIN
Revista:
PHYSICAL REVIEW E
Editorial:
AMER PHYSICAL SOC
Referencias:
Lugar: New York; Año: 2012 vol. 85 p. 361081 - 361087
ISSN:
1539-3755
Resumen:
We study the critical effect of an intermittent social distancing strategy on the propagation of epidemics in adaptive complex networks. We characterize the effect of our strategy in the framework of the susceptible-infected-recovered model. In our model, based on local information, a susceptible individual interrupts the contact with an infected individual with a probability σ and restores it after a fixed time tb.We find that, depending on thenetwork topology, in our social distancing strategy there exists a cutoff threshold σc beyond which the epidemic phase disappears. Our results are supported by a theoretical framework and extensive simulations of the model. Furthermore we show that this strategy is very efficient because it leads to a ?susceptible herd behavior? that protects a large fraction of susceptible individuals. We explain our results using percolation arguments.