The Effect of Disease-induced Mortality on Structural Network Properties

TL;DR

This paper investigates how disease-induced mortality impacts social contact network structures and influences disease spread, highlighting the importance of network topology and introducing a new metric for structural damage assessment.

Contribution

It provides a systematic overview of how epidemiological parameters and network topology interact to affect disease outcomes, introducing a novel metric for network damage evaluation.

Findings

Disease outcomes are highly sensitive to network topology.

A new metric effectively measures disease-driven network damage.

Network compromise influences individual disease burden.

Abstract

As the understanding of the importance of social contact networks in the spread of infectious diseases has increased, so has the interest in understanding the feedback process of the disease altering the social network. While many studies have explored the influence of individual epidemiological parameters and/or underlying network topologies on the resulting disease dynamics, we here provide a systematic overview of the interactions between these two influences on population-level disease outcomes. We show that the sensitivity of the population-level disease outcomes to the combination of epidemiological parameters that describe the disease are critically dependent on the topological structure of the population's contact network. We introduce a new metric for assessing disease-driven structural damage to a network as a population-level outcome. Lastly, we discuss how the expected individual-level disease burden is influenced by the complete suite of epidemiological characteristics for the circulating disease and the ongoing process of network compromise. Our results have broad implications for prediction and mitigation of outbreaks in both natural and human populations.