Optimal Strategies to Contain and Prevent the Spread of Diseases in Group-structured Populations

Abstract

The strength and speed of an epidemic process in a multiplex network is affected by how modular the networks in each layer are. However, it is not obvious how the dynamics of the spreading process change when the group structure and membership varies between layers. In this work, we demonstrate that restructuring the organization of groups within a population can be used as an effective strategy to decrease the severity of an epidemic. Specifically, we show that when group structures are sufficiently correlated outbreaks are longer but milder than for uncorrelated group structures. Further, we find that random immunization decreases the outbreak size and peak infected values to a greater extent than in correlated groups when compared to random immunization in the uncorrelated, normal assignments. Finally, we investigate the effectiveness of targeted immunization strategies on networks with correlated and uncorrelated group structures. We show that immunizing nodes based on their centrality ranking decreases the size of outbreaks compared to random immunization, and that immunizing central nodes in a correlated network helps to decrease the outbreak size more quickly than in uncorrelated networks.