We study the interaction between epidemic spreading and a vaccination process. We assume that, similar to the disease spreading, also the vaccination process occurs through direct contact, i.e., it follows the standard susceptible-infected-susceptible (SIS) dynamics. The two competing processes are asymmetrically coupled as vaccinated nodes can directly become infected at a reduced rate with respect to susceptible ones. We study analytically the model in the framework of mean-field theory finding a rich phase-diagram. When vaccination provides little protection toward infection, two continuous transitions separate a disease-free immunized state from vaccinated-free epidemic state, with an intermediate mixed state where susceptible, infected and vaccinated individuals coexist. As vaccine efficiency increases, a tricritical point leads to a bistable regime and discontinuous phase transitions emerge. Numerical simulations for homogeneous random networks agree very well with analytical predictions.
Vaccination is an effective way to prevent and control the occurrence and epidemic of infectious diseases. However, many factors influence whether the residents decide to get vaccinated or not, such as the efficacy and side effects while individuals hope to obtain immunity through vaccination. In this paper, the public attitude toward vaccination is investigated, especially how it is influenced by the public estimation of vaccines efficacy and reliance on their neighbors' vaccination behavior. We find that improving people's trust in the vaccination greatly benefits increasing the vaccination …
In this work we consider a model of epidemic spreading coupled with an opinion dynamics in a fully-connected population. Regarding the opinion dynamics, the individuals may be in two distinct states, namely in favor or against a vaccination campaign. Individuals against the vaccination follow a standard SIS model, whereas the pro-vaccine individuals can also be in a third compartment, namely Vaccinated. In addition, the opinions change according to the majority-rule dynamics in groups with three individuals. We also consider that the vaccine can give permanent or temporary immunization to the …
We investigate methods to vaccinate contact networks -- i.e. removing nodes in such a way that disease spreading is hindered as much as possible -- with respect to their cost-efficiency. Any real implementation of such protocols would come with costs related both to the vaccination itself, and gathering of information about the network. Disregarding this, we argue, would lead to erroneous evaluation of vaccination protocols. We use the susceptible-infected-recovered model -- the generic model for diseases making patients immune upon recovery -- as our disease-spreading scenario, and analyze ou…
In this work, we address a multicoupled dynamics on complex networks with tunable structural segregation. Specifically, we work on a networked epidemic spreading under a vaccination campaign with agents in favor and against the vaccine. Our results show that such coupled dynamics exhibits a myriad of phenomena such as nonequilibrium transitions accompanied by bistability. Besides we observe the emergence of an intermediate optimal segregation level where the community structure enhances negative opinions over vaccination but counterintuitively hinders - rather than favoring - the global diseas…
The impact of information dissemination on epidemic control is essentially subject to individual behaviors. Unlike information-driven behaviors, vaccination is determined by many cost-related factors, whose correlation with the information dissemination should be better understood. To this end, we propose an evolutionary vaccination game model in multiplex networks by integrating an information-epidemic spreading process into the vaccination dynamics, and explore how information dissemination influences vaccination. The spreading process is described by a two-layer coupled susceptible-alert-in…
The mitigation of an infectious disease spreading has recently gained considerable attention from the research community. It may be obtained by adopting sanitary measurements social rules, together with an extensive vaccination campaign. Vaccination is currently the primary way for mitigating the Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) outbreak without severe lockdown. Its effectiveness also depends on the number and timeliness of administrations and thus demands strict prioritization criteria. Almost all countries have prioritized similar classes of exposed workers obtaining to maximize the survival o…
How to prevent the spread of human diseases is a great challenge for the scientific community and so far there are many studies in which immunization strategies have been developed. However, these kind of strategies usually do not consider that medical institutes may have limited vaccine resources available. In this manuscript, we explore the Susceptible-Infected-Recovered (SIR) model with local dynamic vaccination, and considering limited vaccines. In this model, susceptibles in contact with an infected individual, are vaccinated -with probability $ω$- and then get infected -with probability …
While understanding of periodic recurrent waves of Covid-19 epidemics would aid to combat the pandemics, quantitative analysis of data over a two years period from the outbreak, is lacking. The complexity of Covid-19 recurrent waves is related with the concurrent role of i) the containment measures enforced to mitigate the epidemics spreading ii) the rate of viral gene mutations, and iii) the variable immune response of the host implemented by vaccination. This work focuses on the effect of massive vaccination and gene variants on the recurrent waves in a representative case of countries enfor…
A pandemic, the worldwide spread of a disease, can threaten human beings from the social as well as biological perspectives and paralyze existing living habits. To stave off the more devastating disaster and return to a normal life, people make tremendous efforts at multiscale levels from individual to worldwide: paying attention to hand hygiene, developing social policies such as wearing masks, social distancing, quarantine, and inventing vaccines and remedy. Regarding the current severe pandemic, namely the coronavirus disease 2019, we explore the spreading-suppression effect when adopting t…
The crisis caused by the COVID-19 outbreak around the globe raised an increasing concern about the ongoing emergence of variants of SARS-CoV-2 that may evade the immune response provided by vaccines. New variants appear due to mutation, and as the cases accumulate, the probability of the emergence of a variant of concern increases. In this article, we propose a modified SIR model with waning immunity that captures the competition of two strain classes of an infectious disease under the effect of vaccination with a highly contagious and deadly strain class emerging from a prior strain due to mu…
The containment of epidemic spreading is a major challenge in science. Vaccination, whenever available, is the best way to prevent the spreading, because it eventually immunizes individuals. However, vaccines are not perfect, and total immunization is not guaranteed. Imperfect immunization has driven the emergence of anti-vaccine movements that totally alter the predictions about the epidemic incidence. Here, we propose a mathematically solvable mean-field vaccination model to mimic the spontaneous adoption of vaccines against influenza-like diseases, and the expected epidemic incidence. The r…
This paper presents a discrete time probabilistic dynamic for simulating a contact-based epidemic spreading based on discrete time Markov chain process, in particular the attention is addressed to the susceptible-infectious-removed (SIR) model and the phase diagram of such model will be presented. Then, this report presents the set of equations that represent the optimal control strategies, by the means of Pontryagin's maximum principle, in two different cases a vaccination policy and a combined vaccination-hospitalization policy and show a numerical simulation, with the standard forward-backw…
In this work we analyze the evolution of voluntary vaccination in networked populations by entangling the spreading dynamics of an influenza-like disease with an evolutionary framework taking place at the end of each influenza season so that individuals take or not the vaccine upon their previous experience. Our framework thus put in competition two well-known dynamical properties of scale-free networks: the fast propagation of diseases and the promotion of cooperative behaviors. Our results show that when vaccine is perfect scale-free networks enhance the vaccination behavior with respect to …
Voluntary vaccination is effective to prevent infectious diseases from spreading. Both vaccination behavior and cognition of the vaccination risk play important roles in individual vaccination decision making. However, it is not clear how the co-evolution of the two shapes the population-wide vaccination behavior. We establish a coupled dynamics of epidemic, vaccination behavior and perceived vaccination risk with three different time scales. We assume that the increase of vaccination level inhibits the rise of perceived vaccination risk, and the increase of perceived vaccination risk inhibits…
We study the changes of opinions about vaccination together with the evolution of a disease. In our model we consider a multiplex network consisting of two layers. One of the layers corresponds to a social network where people share their opinions and influence others opinions. The social model that rules the dynamic is the M-model, which takes into account two different processes that occurs in a society: persuasion and compromise. This two processes are related through a parameter $r$, $r<1$ describes a moderate and committed society, for $r>1$ the society tends to have extremist opinions, w…
This work consists of an epidemic model with vaccination coupled with an opinion dynamics. Our objective was to study how disease risk perception can influence opinions about vaccination and therefore the spreading of the disease. Differently from previous works we have considered continuous opinions. The epidemic spreading is governed by a SIS-like model with an extra vaccinated state. In our model individuals vaccinate with a probability proportional to their opinions. The opinions change due to peer influence in pairwise interactions. The epidemic feedback to the opinion dynamics acts as an…
Vaccination and outbreak monitoring are essential tools for preventing and minimizing outbreaks of infectious diseases. Targeted strategies, where the individuals most important for monitoring or preventing outbreaks are selected for intervention, offer a possibility to significantly improve these measures. Although targeted strategies carry a strong potential, identifying optimal target groups remains a challenge. Here we consider the problem of identifying target groups based on digital communication networks (telecommunication, online social media) in order to predict and contain an infecti…
Promoting some typical spreading dynamics, for instance, the spreading of information, commercial message, vaccination guidance, innovation, and political movement, can bring benefits to all aspects of the socio-economic systems. In this study, we propose a strategy for promoting the spreading of the susceptible-infected-recovered model, which is widely applied to describe these common spreading dynamics in real life. Specifically, we first quantify the potential influence that the addition of each latent edge (that is, edges that do not exist before) could cause to the spreading dynamics. The…
The decision of whether or not to vaccinate is a complex one. It involves the contribution both to a social good -- herd immunity -- and to one's own well being. It is informed by social influence, personal experience, education, and mass media. In our work, we investigate a situation in which individuals make their choice based on how social neighbourhood responded to previous epidemics. We do this by proposing a minimalistic model using components from game theory, network theory and the modelling of epidemic spreading, and opinion dynamics. Individuals can use the information about the neig…
Information diffusion and disease spreading in communication-contact layered network are typically asymmetrically coupled with each other, in which how an individual being aware of disease responds to the disease can significantly affect the disease spreading. Many recent studies have demonstrated that human behavioral adoption is a complex and non-Markovian process, where the probability of adopting one behavior is dependent on the cumulative times of the received information and the social reinforcement effect of these cumulative information. We study the impact of such a non-Markovian vacci…
In a world being hit by waves of COVID-19, vaccination is a light on the horizon. However, the roll-out of vaccination strategies and their influence on the pandemic are still open problems. In order to compare the effect of various strategies proposed by the World Health Organization and other authorities, a previously developed SEIRS stochastic model of geographical spreading of the virus is extended by adding a compartment for vaccinated people. The parameters of the model were fitted to describe the pandemic evolution in Argentina, Mexico and Spain to analyze the effect of the proposed vac…
It has been recently discovered that the measles virus can wipe out the adaptive immune system, destroying B lymphocytes and reducing the diversity of non-specific B cells of the infected host. In particular, this implies that previously acquired immunization from vaccination or direct exposition to other pathogens could be erased in a phenomenon named "immune amnesia", whose effects can become particularly worrisome given the actual rise of anti-vaccination movements. Here we present the first attempt to incorporate immune amnesia into standard models of epidemic spreading. In particular, we …
The slogan "nobody is safe until everybody is safe" is a dictum to raise awareness that in an interconnected world, pandemics such as COVID-19, require a global approach. Motivated by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, we model here the spread of a virus in interconnected communities and explore different vaccination scenarios, assuming that the efficacy of the vaccination wanes over time. We start with susceptible populations and consider a susceptible-vaccinated-infected-recovered model with unvaccinated ("Bronze"), moderately vaccinated ("Silver") and very well vaccinated ("Gold") communities, …
Non-pharmaceutical measures such as social distancing, can play an important role to control an epidemic in the absence of vaccinations. In this paper, we study the impact of social distancing on epidemics for which it is executable. We use a mathematical model combining human mobility and disease spreading. For the mobility dynamics, we design an agent based model consisting of pedestrian dynamics with a novel type of force to resemble social distancing in crowded sites. For the spreading dynamics, we consider the compartmental SIE dynamics plus an indirect transmission with the footprints of…
Vaccination is widely recognized as the most effective way of immunization against many infectious diseases. However, unfounded claims about supposed side effects of some vaccines have contributed to spread concern and fear among people, thus inducing vaccination refusal. For instance, MMR vaccine coverage has undergone an important decrease in a large part of Europe and US as a consequence of erroneously alleged side effects, leading to recent measles outbreaks. In this work, we propose a general agent-based model to study the spread of vaccination behavior in social networks, not as an isola…
We study the impact of vaccination on the risk of epidemics spreading through structured networks using the cavity method of statistical physics. We relax the assumption that vaccination prevents all transmission of a disease used in previous studies, such that vaccinated nodes have a small probability of transmission. To do so we extend the cavity method to study networks where nodes have heterogeneous transmissibility. We find that vaccination with partial transmission still provides herd immunity and show how the herd immunity threshold depends upon the assortativity between nodes of differ…
Competition and collaboration are at the heart of multi-agent probabilistic spreading processes. The battle on public opinion and competitive marketing campaigns are typical examples of the former, while the joint spread of multiple diseases such as HIV and tuberculosis demonstrates the latter. These spreads are influenced by the underlying network topology, the infection rates between network constituents, recovery rates and, equally importantly, the interactions between the spreading processes themselves. Here, for the first time we derive dynamic message-passing equations that provide an ex…
We study a multi-type SIR epidemic process among a heterogeneous population that interacts through a network. When we base social contact on a random graph with given vertex degrees, we give limit theorems on the fraction of infected individuals. For a given social distancing individual strategies, we establish the epidemic reproduction number $R_0$ which can be used to identify network vulnerability and inform vaccination policies. In the second part of the paper we study the equilibrium of the social distancing game, in which individuals choose their social distancing level according to an a…
The spreading of Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted the close link between economics and health in the context of emergency management. A widespread vaccination campaign is considered the main tool to contain the economic consequences. This paper will focus, at the level of wealth distribution modelling, on the economic improvements induced by the vaccination campaign in terms of its effectiveness rate. The economic trend during the pandemic is evaluated resorting to a mathematical model joining a classical compartmental model including vaccinated individuals with a kinetic model of wealth dist…
In the face of serious infectious diseases, governments endeavour to implement containment measures such as public vaccination at a macroscopic level. Meanwhile, individuals tend to protect themselves by avoiding contacts with infections at a microscopic level. However, a comprehensive understanding of how such combined strategy influences epidemic dynamics is still lacking. We study a susceptible-infected-susceptible epidemic model with imperfect vaccination on dynamic contact networks, where the macroscopic intervention is represented by random vaccination of the population and the microscop…
Social network analysis is now widely used to investigate the dynamics of infectious disease spread from person to person. Vaccination dramatically disrupts the disease transmission process on a contact network, and indeed, sufficiently high vaccination rates can disrupt the process to such an extent that disease transmission on the network is effectively halted. Here, we build on mounting evidence that health behaviors - such as vaccination, and refusal thereof - can spread through social networks through a process of complex contagion that requires social reinforcement. Using network simulat…
Spreading is a ubiquitous process in the social, biological and technological systems. Therefore, identifying influential spreaders, which is important to prevent epidemic spreading and to establish effective vaccination strategies, is full of theoretical and practical significance. In this paper, a weighted h-index centrality based on virtual nodes extension is proposed to quantify the spreading influence of nodes in complex networks. Simulation results on real-world networks reveal that the proposed method provides more accurate and more consistent ranking than the five classical methods. Mo…
Online social media have greatly affected the way in which we communicate with each other. However, little is known about what are the fundamental mechanisms driving dynamical information flow in online social systems. Here, we introduce a generative model for online sharing behavior that is analytically tractable and which can reproduce several characteristics of empirical micro-blogging data on hashtag usage, such as (time-dependent) heavy-tailed distributions of meme popularity. The presented framework constitutes a null model for social spreading phenomena which, in contrast to purely empi…
Empirical data on contacts between individuals in social contexts play an important role in providing information for models describing human behavior and how epidemics spread in populations. Here, we analyze data on face-to-face contacts collected in an office building. The statistical properties of contacts are similar to other social situations, but important differences are observed in the contact network structure. In particular, the contact network is strongly shaped by the organization of the offices in departments, which has consequences in the design of accurate agent-based models of …
Different pathogens spreading in the same host population often generate complex co-circulation dynamics because of the many possible interactions between the pathogens and the host immune system, the host life cycle, and the space structure of the population. Here we focus on the competition between two acute infections and we address the role of host mobility and cross-immunity in shaping possible dominance/co-dominance regimes. Host mobility is modelled as a network of traveling flows connecting nodes of a metapopulation, and the two-pathogen dynamics is simulated with a stochastic mechanis…
In this paper, we aim to understand the transient dynamics of a susceptible-infected (SI) epidemic spreading process on a large network. The SI model has been largely overlooked in the literature, while it is naturally a better fit for modeling the malware propagation in early times when patches/vaccines are not available, or over a wider range of timescales when massive patching is practically infeasible. Nonetheless, its analysis is simply non-trivial, as its important dynamics are all transient and the usual stability/steady-state analysis no longer applies. To this end, we develop a theore…
The success of a vaccination program is crucially dependent on its adoption by a critical fraction of the population, as the resulting herd immunity prevents future outbreaks of an epidemic. However, the effectiveness of a campaign can engender its own undoing if individuals choose to not get vaccinated in the belief that they are protected by herd immunity. Although this may appear to be an optimal decision, based on a rational appraisal of cost and benefits to the individual, it exposes the population to subsequent outbreaks. We investigate if voluntary vaccination can emerge in a an integra…
We study the competition of two spreading entities, for example innovations, in complex contagion processes in complex networks. We develop an analytical framework and examine the role of dual users, i.e. agents using both technologies. Searching for the spreading transition of the new innovation and the extinction transition of a preexisting one, we identify different phases depending on network mean degree, prevalence of preexisting technology, and thresholds of the contagion process. Competition with the preexisting technology effectively suppresses the spread of the new innovation, but it …
The COVID-19 pandemic has devastated the world in an unprecedented way, causing enormous loss of life. Time and again, public health authorities have urged people to become vaccinated to protect themselves and mitigate the spread of the disease. However, vaccine hesitancy has stalled vaccination levels in the United States. This study explores the effect of vaccine hesitancy on the spread of disease by introducing an SIRS-V$_κ$ model, with compartments of susceptible (S), infected (I), recovered (R), and vaccinated (V). We leverage the concept of carrying capacity to account for vaccine hesita…
Cooperation and competition between pathogens can alter the amount of individuals affected by a co-infection. Nonetheless, the evolution of the pathogens' behavior has been overlooked. Here, we consider a co-evolutionary model where the simultaneous spreading is described by a two-pathogen susceptible-infected-recovered model in an either synergistic or competitive manner. At the end of each epidemic season, the pathogens species reproduce according to their fitness that, in turn, depends on the payoff accumulated during the spreading season in a hawk-and-dove game. This co-evolutionary model …
Cultural competition has throughout our history shaped and reshaped the geography of boundaries between humans. Language and culture are intimately connected and linguists often use distinctive keywords to quantify the dynamics of information spreading in societies harbouring strong culture centres. One prominent example, which is addressed here, is Kyoto's historical impact on Japanese culture. We construct a first minimal model, based on shared properties of linguistic maps, to address the interplay between information flow and geography. In particular, we show that spreading of information …
Epidemic-like spreading processes on top of multilayered interconnected complex networks reveal a rich phase diagram of intertwined competition effects. A recent study by the authors [Granell et al. Phys. Rev. Lett. 111, 128701 (2013)] presented the analysis of the interrelation between two processes accounting for the spreading of an epidemics, and the spreading of information awareness to prevent its infection, on top of multiplex networks. The results in the case in which awareness implies total immunization to the disease, revealed the existence of a metacritical point at which the critica…
The recent outbreak of a novel coronavirus and its rapid spread underlines the importance of understanding human mobility. Enclosed spaces, such as public transport vehicles (e.g. buses and trains), offer a suitable environment for infections to spread widely and quickly. Investigating the movement patterns and the physical encounters of individuals on public transit systems is thus critical to understand the drivers of infectious disease outbreaks. For instance previous work has explored the impact of recurring patterns inherent in human mobility on disease spread, but has not considered othe…
In this paper, we study the competition of two diffusion processes for achieving the maximum possible diffusion in an area. This competition, however, does not occur in the same circumstance; one of these processes is a normal diffusion with a higher growth rate, and another one is an anomalous diffusion with a lower growth rate. The trivial solution of the proposed model suggests that the winner is the one with the higher growth rate. But, the question is: what characteristics and strategies should the second diffusion include to prolong the survival in such a competition? The studied diffusi…
In this paper, we tackle the problem of innovation spreading from a modeling point of view. We consider a networked system of individuals, with a competition between two groups. We show its relation to the innovation spreading issues. We introduce an abstract model and show how it can be interpreted in this framework, as well as what conclusions we can draw form it. We further explain how model-derived conclusions can help to investigate the original problem, as well as other, similar problems. The model is an agent-based model assuming simple binary attributes of those agents. It uses a major…
The spreading of news, memes and other pieces of information occurring via online social platforms has a strong and growing impact on our modern societies, with enormous consequences, that may be beneficial but also catastrophic. In this work we consider a recently introduced model for information diffusion in social media taking explicitly into account the competition of a large number of items of diverse quality. We map the meme dynamics onto a one-dimensional diffusion process that we solve analytically, deriving the lifetime and popularity distributions of individual memes. We also present…
The temporal dynamics of social interactions were shown to influence the spread of disease. Here, we model the conditions of progression and competition for several viral strains, exploring various levels of cross-immunity over temporal networks. We use our interaction-driven contagion model and characterize, using it, several viral variants. Our results, obtained on temporal random networks and on real-world interaction data, demonstrate that temporal dynamics are crucial to determining the competition results. We consider two and three competing pathogens and show the conditions under which …
Human mobility is one of the key factors at the basis of the spreading of diseases in a population. Containment strategies are usually devised on movement scenarios based on coarse-grained assumptions. Mobility phone data provide a unique opportunity for building models and defining strategies based on very precise information about the movement of people in a region or in a country. Another very important aspect is the underlying social structure of a population, which might play a fundamental role in devising information campaigns to promote vaccination and preventive measures, especially in…
We perform an analytical sensitivity analysis for a model of a continuous-time branching process evolving on a fixed network. This allows us to determine the relative importance of the model parameters to the growth of the population on the network. We then apply our results to the early stages of an influenza-like epidemic spreading among a set of cities connected by air routes in the United States. We also consider vaccination and analyze the sensitivity of the total size of the epidemic with respect to the fraction of vaccinated people. Our analysis shows that the epidemic growth is more se…
