Impact of individual behavioral changes on epidemic spreading in time-varying networks

TL;DR

This paper develops a mean-field theory to analyze how individual behavioral changes like quarantine, protection, and social distancing affect epidemic thresholds and sizes in dynamic networks, providing insights for epidemic control.

Contribution

It introduces an analytical framework linking behavioral changes with social network attributes to evaluate their impact on epidemic spreading.

Findings

Behavioral changes increase epidemic threshold, delaying outbreaks.

Self-quarantine and social distancing reduce epidemic size.

Timing and combination of behaviors significantly influence epidemic suppression.

Abstract

Changs in individual behavior often entangles with the dynamic interaction of individuals, which complicates the epidemic process and brings great challenges for the understanding and control of the epidemic. In this work, we consider three kinds of typical behavioral changes in epidemic process that is, self-quarantine of infected individuals, self-protection of susceptible individuals, and social distancing between them. We connect the behavioral changes with individual's social attributes by the activity-driven network with attractiveness. A mean-field theory is established to derive an analytical estimate of epidemic threshold for SIS models with individual behavioral changes, which depends on the correlations between activity, attractiveness and the number of generative links in the susceptible and infected states. We find that individual behaviors play different roles in suppressing the epidemic. Although all the behavioral changes could delay the epidemic by increasing the epidemic threshold, self-quarantine and social distancing of infected individuals could effectively decrease the epidemic size. In addition, simultaneous changes in these behaviors and the timing of implement of them also play a key role in suppressing the epidemic. These results provide helpful significance for understanding the interaction of individual behaviors in the epidemic process.