Infection spreading and recovery in a square lattice

TL;DR

This study explores how initial infection patterns and migration rates influence disease spread and recovery in a square lattice, revealing conditions for self-organized healing and the impact of network rewiring.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed analysis of initial infection configurations and migration effects on disease dynamics, including a semi-analytical method for critical migration rate determination.

Findings

Infection spreads monotonically without recovery in infected core patches.

Self-organized recovery occurs at high migration in infected peripheral patches.

Rewiring links can induce recovery and create infection-free networks.

Abstract

We investigate spreading and recovery of disease in a square lattice, and in particular, emphasize the role of the initial distribution of infected patches in the network, on the progression of an endemic and initiation of a recovery process, if any, due to migration of both the susceptible and infected hosts. The disease starts in the lattice with three possible initial distribution patterns of infected and infection-free sites, infected core patches (ICP), infected peripheral patches (IPP) and randomly distributed infected patches (RDIP). Our results show that infection spreads monotonically in the lattice with increasing migration without showing any sign of recovery in the ICP case. In the IPP case, it follows a similar monotonic progression with increasing migration, however, a self-organized healing process starts for higher migration, leading the lattice to full recovery at a critical rate of migration. Encouragingly, for the initial RDIP arrangement, chances of recovery are much higher with a lower rate of critical migration. An eigenvalue based semi-analytical study is made to determine the critical migration rate for realizing a stable infection-free lattice. The initial fraction of infected patches and the force of infection play significant roles in the self-organized recovery. They follow an exponential law, for the RDIP case, that governs the recovery process. For the frustrating case of ICP arrangement, we propose a random rewiring of links in the lattice allowing long-distance migratory paths that effectively initiate a recovery process. Global prevalence of infection thereby declines and progressively improves with the rewiring probability that follows a power law with the critical migration and leads to the birth of emergent infection-free networks.