Several recent studies have tackled the issue of optimal network immunization by providing efficient criteria to identify key nodes to be removed in order to break apart a network, thus preventing the occurrence of extensive epidemic outbreaks. Yet, although the efficiency of those criteria has been demonstrated also in empirical networks, preventive immunization is rarely applied to real-world scenarios, where the usual approach is the a posteriori attempt to contain epidemic outbreaks using quarantine measures. Here we compare the efficiency of prevention with that of quarantine in terms of the tradeoff between the number of removed and saved nodes on both synthetic and empirical topologies. We show how, consistent with common sense, but contrary to common practice, in many cases preventing is better than curing: depending on network structure, rescuing an infected network by quarantine could become inefficient soon after the first infection.
The Covid-19 pandemic is ongoing worldwide, and the damage it has caused is unprecedented. For prevention, South Korea has adopted a local quarantine strategy rather than a global lockdown. This approach not only minimizes economic damage, but it also efficiently prevents the spread of the disease. In this work, the spread of COVID-19 under local quarantine measures is modeled using the Susceptible-Exposed-Infected-Recovered model on complex networks. In this network approach, the links connected to isolated people are disconnected and then reinstated when they are released. This link dynamics…
Contact tracing and quarantine are well established non-pharmaceutical epidemic control tools. The paper aims to clarify the impact of these measures in COVID-19 epidemic. A new deterministic model is introduced (SEIRQ: susceptible, exposed, infectious, removed, quarantined) with Q compartment capturing individuals and releasing them with delay. We obtain a simple rule defining the reproduction number $\mathcal{R}$ in terms of quarantine parameters, ratio of diagnosed cases and transmission parameters. The model is applied to the epidemic in Poland in March - April 2020, when social distancing…
The importance of a strict quarantine has been widely debated during the COVID-19 epidemic even from the purely epidemiological point of view. One argument against strict lockdown measures is that once the strict quarantine is lifted, the epidemic comes back, and so the cumulative number of infected individuals during the entire epidemic will stay the same. We consider an SIR model on a network and follow the disease dynamics, modeling the phases of quarantine by changing the node degree distribution. We show that the system reaches different steady states based on the history: the outcome of …
Absent a drug or vaccine, containing epidemic outbreaks is achieved by means of social distancing, specifically mobility restrictions and lock-downs. Such measures impose a hurtful toll on the economy, and are difficult to sustain for extended periods. As an alternative, we propose here an alternating quarantine strategy, in which at every instance, half of the population remains under lock-down while the other half continues to be active, maintaining a routine of weekly succession between activity and quarantine. This regime affords a dual partition:\ half of the population interacts for only…
This study focuses on investigating the manner in which a prompt quarantine measure suppresses epidemics in networks. A simple and ideal quarantine measure is considered in which an individual is detected with a probability immediately after it becomes infected and the detected one and its neighbors are promptly isolated. The efficiency of this quarantine in suppressing a susceptible-infected-removed (SIR) model is tested in random graphs and uncorrelated scale-free networks. Monte Carlo simulations are used to show that the prompt quarantine measure outperforms random and acquaintance prevent…
We consider an epidemic process on adaptive activity-driven temporal networks, with adaptive behaviour modelled as a change in activity and attractiveness due to infection. By using a mean-field approach, we derive an analytical estimate of the epidemic threshold for SIS and SIR epidemic models for a general adaptive strategy, which strongly depends on the correlations between activity and attractiveness in the susceptible and infected states. We focus on strong social distancing, implementing two types of quarantine inspired by recent real case studies: an active quarantine, in which the popu…
The COVID-19 pandemic has challenged authorities at different levels of government administration around the globe. When faced with diseases of this severity, it is useful for the authorities to have prediction tools to estimate in advance the impact on the health system and the human, material, and economic resources that will be necessary. In this paper, we construct an extended Susceptible-Exposed-Infected-Recovered model that incorporates the social structure of Mar del Plata, the $4^\circ$ most inhabited city in Argentina and head of the Municipality of General Pueyrredón. Moreover, we co…
In this work, we inspect the reliability of controlling and quelling an epidemic disease mimicked by a Susceptible-Infected-Susceptible (SIS) model defined on a complex network by means of current and implementable quarantine and isolation policies. Specifically, we consider that each individual in the network is originally linked to two types of individuals: members of the same household and acquaintances. The topology of this network evolves taking into account a probability $q$ that aims at representing the quarantine or isolation process in which the connection with acquaintances is disrup…
Contact tracing via digital tracking applications installed on mobile phones is an important tool for controlling epidemic spreading. Its effectivity can be quantified by modifying the standard methodology for analyzing percolation and connectivity of contact networks. We apply this framework to networks with varying degree distributions, numbers of application users, and probabilities of quarantine failures. Further, we study structured populations with homophily and heterophily and the possibility of degree-targeted application distribution. Our results are based on a combination of explicit…
We study the critical effect of quarantine on the propagation of epidemics on an adaptive network of social contacts. For this purpose, we analyze the susceptible-infected-recovered (SIR) model in the presence of quarantine, where susceptible individuals protect themselves by disconnecting their links to infected neighbors with probability w, and reconnecting them to other susceptible individuals chosen at random. Starting from a single infected individual, we show by an analytical approach and simulations that there is a phase transition at a critical rewiring (quarantine) threshold w_c separ…
This paper is based on the observation that, during Covid-19 epidemic, the choice of which individuals should be tested has an important impact on the effectiveness of selective confinement measures. This decision problem is closely related to the problem of optimal sensor selection, which is a very active research subject in control engineering. The goal of this paper is to propose a policy to smartly select the individuals to be tested. The main idea is to model the epidemics as a stochastic dynamic system and to select the individual to be tested accordingly to some optimality criteria, e.g…
Since the first recording of what we now call Covid-19 infection in Wuhan, Hubei province, China on Dec 31, 2019, the disease has spread worldwide and met with a wide variety of social distancing and quarantine policies. The effectiveness of these responses is notoriously difficult to quantify as individuals travel, violate policies deliberately or inadvertently, and infect others without themselves being detected. In this paper, we attempt to interpret and extrapolate from publicly available data using a mixed first-principles epidemiological equations and data-driven neural network model. Le…
The impact of mitigation or control measures on an epidemics can be estimated by fitting the parameters of a compartmental model to empirical data, and running the model forward with modified parameters that account for a specific measure. This approach has several drawbacks, stemming from biases or lack of availability of data and instability of parameter estimates. Here we take the opposite approach -- that we call reverse epidemiology. Given the data, we reconstruct backward in time an ensemble of networks of contacts, and we assess the impact of measures on that specific realization of the…
Continuum models of epidemics do not take into account the underlying microscopic network structure of social connections. This drawback becomes extreme during quarantine when most people dramatically decrease their number of social interactions, while others (like cashiers in grocery stores) continue maintaining hundreds of contacts per day. We formulate a two-level model of quarantine. On a microscopic level, we model a single neighborhood assuming a star-network structure. On a mesoscopic level, the neighborhoods are placed on a two-dimensional lattice with nearest neighbors interactions. T…
The COVID-19 pandemic led several countries to resort to social distancing, the only known way to slow down the spread of the virus and keep the health system under control. Here we use an individual based model (IBM) to study how the duration, start date and intensity of quarantine affect the height and position of the peak of the infection curve. We show that stochastic effects, inherent to the model dynamics, lead to variable outcomes for the same set of parameters, making it crucial to compute the probability of each result. To simplify the analysis we divide the outcomes in only two categ…
Changs in individual behavior often entangles with the dynamic interaction of individuals, which complicates the epidemic process and brings great challenges for the understanding and control of the epidemic. In this work, we consider three kinds of typical behavioral changes in epidemic process that is, self-quarantine of infected individuals, self-protection of susceptible individuals, and social distancing between them. We connect the behavioral changes with individual's social attributes by the activity-driven network with attractiveness. A mean-field theory is established to derive an ana…
In the context of the recent COVID-19 outbreak, quarantine has been used to "flatten the curve" and slow the spread of the disease. In this paper, we show that this is not the only benefit of quarantine for the mitigation of an SIR epidemic spreading on a graph. Indeed, human contact networks exhibit a powerlaw structure, which means immunizing nodes at random is extremely ineffective at slowing the epidemic, while immunizing high-degree nodes can efficiently guarantee herd immunity. We theoretically prove that if quarantines are declared at the right moment, high-degree nodes are disproportio…
Most researches on adaptive networks mainly concentrate on the properties of steady state, but neglect transient dynamics. In this study, we pay attention to the emergence of community structures in transient process and the effects of community-based control strategies on epidemic spreading. First, by normalizing modularity $Q$, we investigate the evolution of community structures during the transient process, and find that very strong community structures are induced by rewiring mechanism in the early stage of epidemic spreading, which remarkably delays the outbreaks of epidemic. Then we stu…
The ongoing Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a major crisis that has significantly affected the healthcare sector and global economies, which made it the main subject of various fields in scientific and technical research. To properly understand and control this new epidemic, mathematical modelling is presented as a very effective tool that can illustrate the mechanisms of its propagation. In this regard, the use of compartmental models is the most prominent approach adopted in the literature to describe the dynamics of COVID-19. Along the same line, we aim during this study to generaliz…
We study a dynamics of the epidemiological infection spreading at different values of the risk factor $β$ (a control parameter) with the using of dynamic Monte Carlo approach (DMC). In our toy model, the infection transmits due to contacts of randomly moving individuals. We show that the behavior of recovereds critically depends on the $β$ value. For sub-critical values $β<β_{c}\sim 0.6$, the number of infected cases asymptotically converges to zero, such that for a moderate risk factor the infection may disappear with time. Our simulations shown that over time, the properties of such a system…
The spread of COVID-19 caused by the recently discovered SARS-CoV-2 virus has become a worldwide problem with devastating consequences. To slow down the spread of the pandemic, mass quarantines have been implemented globally, provoking further social and economic disruptions. Here, we implement a comprehensive contact tracing network analysis to find an optimized quarantine protocol to dismantle the chain of transmission of coronavirus with minimal disruptions to society. We track billions of anonymized GPS human mobility datapoints from a compilation of hundreds of mobile apps deployed in Lat…
Herein we provide a closed form perturbative solution to a general $M$-node network SIS model using the transport rates between nodes as a perturbation parameter. We separate the dynamics into a short-time regime and a medium/long-time regime. We solve the short-time dynamics of the system and provide a limit before which our explicit, analytical result of the first-order perturbation for the medium/long-time regime is to be employed. These stitched calculations provide an approximation to the full temporal dynamics for rather general initial conditions. To further corroborate our results, we …
The topic of finding effective strategy to halt virus in complex network is of current interest. We propose an immunization strategy for seasonal epidemics that occur periodically. Based on the local information of the infection status from the previous epidemic season, the selection of vaccinated nodes is optimized gradually. The evolution of vaccinated nodes during iterations demonstrates that the immunization tends to locate in both global hubs and local hubs. We analyze the epidemic prevalence by a heterogeneous mean-field method and present numerical simulations of our model. This immuniz…
Agent-based modeling for realistic reproduction of human mobility and contact behavior to evaluate test and isolation strategies in epidemic infectious disease spread
The recurrent infectious diseases and their increasing impact on the society has promoted the study of strategies to slow down the epidemic spreading. In this review we outline the applications of percolation theory to describe strategies against epidemic spreading on complex networks. We give a general outlook of the relation between link percolation and the susceptible-infected-recovered model, and introduce the node void percolation process to describe the dilution of the network composed by healthy individual, $i.e$, the network that sustain the functionality of a society. Then, we survey …
In this paper, we propose a Boltzmann-type kinetic model of the spreading of an infectious disease on a network. The latter describes the connections among countries, cities or districts depending on the spatial scale of interest. The disease transmission is represented in terms of the viral load of the individuals and is mediated by social contacts among them, taking into account their displacements across the nodes of the network. We formally derive the hydrodynamic equations for the density and the mean viral load of the individuals on the network and we analyse the large-time trends of the…
Motivated by the need for novel robust approaches to modelling the Covid-19 epidemic, this paper treats a population of $N$ individuals as an inhomogeneous random social network (IRSN). The nodes of the network represent different types of individuals and the edges represent significant social relationships. An epidemic is pictured as a contagion process that changes daily, triggered on day $0$ by a seed infection introduced into the population. Individuals' social behaviour and health status are assumed to be random, with probability distributions that vary with their type. First a formulatio…
Quarantining and contact tracing are popular ad hoc practices for mitigating epidemic outbreaks. However, few mathematical theories are currently available to asses the role of a network in the effectiveness of these practices. In this paper, we study how the final size of an epidemic is influenced by the procedure that combines contact tracing and quarantining on a network null model: the configuration model. Namely, we suppose that infected vertices may self-quarantine and trace their infector with a given success probability. A traced infector is, in turn, less likely to infect others. We s…
Identifying influential nodes in a network is a fundamental issue due to its wide applications, such as accelerating information diffusion or halting virus spreading. Many measures based on the network topology have emerged over the years to identify influential nodes such as Betweenness, Closeness, and Eigenvalue centrality. However, although most real-world networks are modular, few measures exploit this property. Recent works have shown that it has a significant effect on the dynamics on networks. In a modular network, a node has two types of influence: a local influence (on the nodes of it…
