Epidemic spreading dynamics with drug-resistant and heterogeneous contacts

TL;DR

This paper develops a unified edge-based model to analyze how drug resistance and contact strength influence epidemic spread on networks, revealing different outbreak dynamics and thresholds.

Contribution

It introduces a novel edge-based compartmental model incorporating drug resistance and contact heterogeneity, providing analytical predictions validated by simulations.

Findings

Slow outbreaks in fully drug-resistant epidemics without enough strong contacts.

Faster, discontinuous outbreaks with partial resistance and few strong contacts.

Strong contacts promote epidemic spread and influence outbreak thresholds.

Abstract

Drug resistance and strong contacts actually play crucial roles in epidemic spread in complex systems. Nevertheless, neither theoretical model or methodology is proposed to address this. We thus consider an edge-based epidemic spread model considering the two key ingredients, in which the contacts are grouped into two classes: strong contacts and normal ones. Next, we present a unified edge-based compartmental approach to the spread dynamics on Erd\"{o}s-R\'{e}nyi (ER) networks and validate its results by extensive numerical simulations. In case that epidemic is totally drug-resistant, we both numerically and theoretically show a slow outbreak (continuous transition) of epidemics when number of strong contacts is not enough for the emergence of null threshold. If the epidemic owns partial resistance, we would observe evident faster-growing outbreaks (discontinuous transitions) and larger final epidemic sizes for few strong contacts, instead of emergence of null threshold with increase of strong contacts. Inhibiting effect of infection threshold, positive roles of strong contacts and strength of strong contacts in promoting outbreaks are also approved. Throughout this paper, we could drive exact predictions through the analytical approach, showing good agreements with numerical simulations.