Rescue of endemic states in interconnected networks with adaptive coupling

TL;DR

This paper investigates how adaptive rewiring of interlayer links in interconnected networks can suppress epidemic spreading, potentially leading to network decoupling and endemic state transitions, with implications for epidemic control strategies.

Contribution

It introduces a model of epidemic spreading with adaptive interlayer rewiring, revealing how rewiring influences epidemic thresholds and network connectivity, a novel approach in multilayer epidemic modeling.

Findings

Rewiring reduces effective interlayer connectivity, potentially decoupling networks.

A threshold exists where rewiring transitions the system from endemic to healthy states.

Finite-size effects are amplified by rewiring, affecting epidemic confinement.

Abstract

We study the Susceptible-Infected-Susceptible model of epidemic spreading on two layers of networks interconnected by adaptive links, which are rewired at random to avoid contacts between infected and susceptible nodes at the interlayer. We find that the rewiring reduces the effective connectivity for the transmission of the disease between layers, and may even totally decouple the networks. Weak endemic states, in which the epidemics spreads only if the two layers are interconnected, show a transition from the endemic to the healthy phase when the rewiring overcomes a threshold value that depends on the infection rate, the strength of the coupling and the mean connectivity of the networks. In the strong endemic scenario, in which the epidemics is able to spread on each separate network, the prevalence in each layer decreases when increasing the rewiring, arriving to single network values only in the limit of infinitely fast rewiring. We also find that finite-size effects are amplified by the rewiring, as there is a finite probability that the epidemics stays confined in only one network during its lifetime.