# Rapid decay in the relative efficiency of quarantine to halt epidemics in networks

## TL;DR

This paper compares the effectiveness of network quarantine versus prevention strategies in controlling epidemics, showing that prevention often becomes more efficient quickly after initial infections, especially depending on network structure.

## Contribution

It provides a comparative analysis of quarantine and prevention in epidemic control on real and synthetic networks, highlighting the rapid decay in quarantine efficiency.

## Key findings

- Prevention can be more effective than quarantine in many network scenarios.
- Quarantine efficiency diminishes rapidly after initial infection.
- Network structure significantly influences the relative success of prevention versus quarantine.

## Abstract

Several recent studies have tackled the issue of optimal network immunization by providing efficient criteria to identify key nodes to be removed in order to break apart a network, thus preventing the occurrence of extensive epidemic outbreaks. Yet, although the efficiency of those criteria has been demonstrated also in empirical networks, preventive immunization is rarely applied to real-world scenarios, where the usual approach is the a posteriori attempt to contain epidemic outbreaks using quarantine measures. Here we compare the efficiency of prevention with that of quarantine in terms of the tradeoff between the number of removed and saved nodes on both synthetic and empirical topologies. We show how, consistent with common sense, but contrary to common practice, in many cases preventing is better than curing: depending on network structure, rescuing an infected network by quarantine could become inefficient soon after the first infection.