Spreading processes in "post-epidemic" environments. II. Safety patterns on scale-free networks

TL;DR

This study investigates how spreading processes behave on scale-free networks, focusing on safety patterns and the effectiveness of different immunization strategies in controlling epidemics.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of safety patterns and threshold values for epidemic spreading on scale-free networks under various immunization scenarios.

Findings

Targeted immunization significantly increases network resistance to spreading.

Scale-free networks are more vulnerable to epidemics than regular lattices.

Effective spreading rate thresholds decrease with higher network heterogeneity.

Abstract

This paper continues our previous study on spreading processes in inhomogeneous populations consisting of susceptible and immune individuals [V. Blavatska, Yu. Holovatch, Physica A 573, 125980 (2021)]. A special role in such populations is played by "safety patterns" of susceptible nodes surrounded by the immune ones. Here, we analyze spreading on scale-free networks, where the distribution of node connectivity $k$ obeys a power-law decay $\sim k^{-\lambda}$. We assume, that only a fraction $p$ of individual nodes can be affected by spreading process, while remaining $1-p$ are immune. We apply the synchronous cellular automaton algorithm and study the stationary states and spatial patterning in SI, SIS and SIR models in a range $2 < \lambda < 3 $. Two immunization scenarios, the random immunization and an intentional one, that targets the highest degrees nodes are considered. A distribution of safety patterns is obtained for the case of both scenarios. Estimates for the threshold values of the effective spreading rate $\beta_c$ as a function of active agents fraction $p$ and parameter $\lambda$ are obtained and efficiency of both vaccination techniques are analyzed quantitatively. The impact of the underlying network heterogeneous structure is manifest e.g. in decreasing the $\beta_c$ values within the random scenario as compared to corresponding values in the case of regular latticek. This result quantitatively confirms the compliency of scale-free networks for disease spreading. On contrary, the vaccination within the targeted scenario makes the complex networks much more resistant to epidemic spreading as compared with regular lattice structures.