A simple and efficient model for epidemic control on multiplex networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces a preemptive isolation strategy on multiplex networks that significantly reduces epidemic spread, offering a practical non-pharmaceutical intervention for diseases with complex transmission routes.

Contribution

It proposes a novel preemptive isolation protocol targeting second nearest neighbors on multiplex networks, improving epidemic control over existing strategies.

Findings

Preemptive isolation reduces epidemic size.

The protocol decreases the number of isolated individuals per unit time.

Effective even with partial contact tracing.

Abstract

When an unprecedented infectious disease with high mortality and transmissibility emerges, immediate usage of vaccines or medicines is hardly available. Thus, many health authorities rely on non-pharmaceutical interventions through traceable fixed contacts. However, in reality, there is an additional type of transmission routes to the regular and fixed contacts: the random anonymous infection cases where non-pharmaceutical interventions are hardly feasible. In our study, such realistic situations are implemented by the susceptible-infected-recovered model with isolation on multiplex networks. The multiplex networks are composed of a fixed interaction layer and a layer with time-varying random interactions to represent the different types of disease spreading routes. The multiplex networks represent the combinations of the quenched disorder and annealed disorder. Here, we suggest a preemptive isolation protocol which isolates the second nearest neighbors of the hospitalized individuals and compare it with one of the most popular protocol adopted by many health organizations over the globe. From numerical simulations we find that our preemptive measure significantly reduces both the final epidemic size and the number of the isolated per unit time. Our finding suggests a better non-pharmaceutical intervention which can be adopted to various types of diseases even though the contact tracing is only partially available.