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 be heterogeneous, which can affect the way a disease spreads through a population, reaches a tipping point in the fraction of infected individuals, and becomes an epidemic. This property, called disorder, is usually associated with contact times between individuals and can bemodeled by a weighted network, where the weights are related to normalized contact times ω. In this paper, we study the SIR model for disease spreading when both close and distant types of interactions are present. We develop a mitigation strategy that reduces only the time duration of distant contacts, which are easier to alter in practice.Using branching theory, supported by simulations, we found that the effectiveness of the strategy increases when the density f_1 of close contacts decreases. Moreover, we found a threshold f^~_1 = T_c /β below which the strategy can bring the system from an epidemic to a non-epidemic phase, even when close contacts have the longest time durations.