Targeted Recovery as an Effective Strategy against Epidemic Spreading

TL;DR

This paper introduces a targeted recovery strategy focusing on individuals with few infected neighbors, significantly reducing epidemic spread across various network types and revealing spatial confinement and growth dynamics of outbreaks.

Contribution

It presents a novel targeted intervention protocol that outperforms spontaneous recovery in controlling epidemics on different network structures.

Findings

Epidemic outbreaks are minimized with targeted recovery.

Spatially embedded networks show confined epidemic spread.

Epidemic spot radius grows linearly with spreading rate.

Abstract

We propose a targeted intervention protocol where recovery is restricted to individuals that have the least number of infected neighbours. Our recovery strategy is highly efficient on any kind of network, since epidemic outbreaks are minimal when compared to the baseline scenario of spontaneous recovery. In the case of spatially embedded networks, we find that an epidemic stays strongly spatially confined with a characteristic length scale undergoing a random walk. We demonstrate numerically and analytically that this dynamics leads to an epidemic spot with a flat surface structure and a radius that grows linearly with the spreading rate.