Cost-efficient vaccination protocols for network epidemiology

TL;DR

This paper evaluates cost-efficient vaccination strategies in contact networks, emphasizing the importance of considering both vaccination and information gathering costs, and identifies the most effective protocols under various cost scenarios.

Contribution

It introduces a cost-aware framework for selecting vaccination protocols in network epidemiology, highlighting the impact of different cost parameters on protocol efficiency.

Findings

Acquaintance vaccination is optimal at high vaccination costs and low information costs.

Degree-based protocols outperform others when information gathering is expensive.

Protocol effectiveness varies significantly with the relative costs of vaccination and information gathering.

Abstract

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 outbreaks on both empirical and model networks. For different relative costs, different protocols dominate. For high vaccination costs and low costs of gathering information, the so-called acquaintance vaccination is the most cost efficient. For other parameter values, protocols designed for query-efficient identification of the network's largest degrees are most efficient.