Stay with Your Community: Bridges between Clusters Trigger Expansion of COVID-19

TL;DR

This study models COVID-19 spread over modified scale-free networks representing human social behavior, revealing how community bridges can trigger second waves and informing strategies for managing contact restrictions.

Contribution

The paper introduces a modified scale-free network model incorporating community bridges and constraints, providing new insights into the dynamics of COVID-19 second waves.

Findings

Second waves can occur without external influences due to community bridges.

Changing network structure during infection can lead to larger second peaks.

Release of contact constraints near the peak can trigger higher second waves.

Abstract

The spreading of virus infection is here simulated over artificial human networks. The real-space urban life of people is modeled as a modified scale-free network with constraints. A scale-free network has been adopted in several studies for modeling on-line communities so far but is modified here for the aim to represent peoples' social behaviors where the generated communities are restricted reflecting the spatiotemporal constraints in the real life. Furthermore, the networks have been extended by introducing multiple cliques in the initial step of network construction and enabling people to zero-degree people as well as popular (large degree) people. As a result, four findings and a policy proposal have been obtained. First, the "second waves" occur without external influence or constraints on contacts or the releasing of the constraints. These second waves, mostly lower than the first wave, implies the bridges between infected and fresh clusters may trigger new expansions of spreading. Second, if the network changes the structure on the way of infection spreading or after its suppression, the peak of the second wave can be larger than the first. Third, the peak height in the time series depends on the difference between the upper bound of the number of people each member accepts to meet and the number of people one chooses to meet. This tendency is observed for two kinds of artificial networks and implies the impact of the bridges between communities on the virus spreading. Fourth, the release of once given constraint may trigger a second wave higher than the peak of the time series without introducing any constraint from the beginning, if the release is introduced at a time close to the peak. Thus, both governments and individuals should be careful in returning to human society with inter-community contacts.