Contact switching as a control strategy for epidemic outbreaks

TL;DR

This paper investigates contact switching as a robust strategy to control epidemic outbreaks, demonstrating its potential to suppress diseases even with limited information and in complex epidemiological models.

Contribution

It introduces a model where contact switching can completely suppress epidemics, highlighting its effectiveness and robustness as a control strategy.

Findings

Reconnection can fully suppress the disease.

Contact switching leads to continuous or discontinuous transitions.

The strategy remains effective even with asymptomatic phases.

Abstract

We study the effects of switching social contacts as a strategy to control epidemic outbreaks. Connections between susceptible and infective individuals can be broken by either individual, and then reconnected to a randomly chosen member of the population. It is assumed that the reconnecting individual has no previous information on the epidemiological condition of the new contact. We show that reconnection can completely suppress the disease, both by continuous and discontinuous transitions between the endemic and the infection-free states. For diseases with an asymptomatic phase, we analyze the conditions for the suppression of the disease, and show that, even when these conditions are not met, the increase of the endemic infection level is usually rather small. We conclude that, within some simple epidemiological models, contact switching is a quite robust and effective control strategy. This suggests that it may also be an efficient method in more complex situations.