Epidemic Transmission Modelling on the Birth-death Evolving Network with Indirect Contacts

TL;DR

This paper models epidemic spread on a dynamic birth-death network considering population migration and indirect contacts, revealing how these factors influence epidemic dynamics.

Contribution

It introduces a novel birth-death evolving network model that incorporates individual behaviors like migration and indirect contacts affecting epidemic spread.

Findings

Indirect contacts facilitate epidemic transmission.

Network dynamics influence population sizes of epidemic states.

Population migration impacts epidemic progression.

Abstract

Epidemic modelling on complex networks has been studied intensively all the time. The majority of relative research assumes that the time scale of the underlying network evolution is much larger compared to the propagation dynamics on it, while the co-evolution of epidemics and networks needs exploring further. In this paper, we investigate how our recently proposed birth-death evolving network impacts the Susceptible-Infected-Recovered-Susceptible (SIRS) epidemic process. Our evolving network considers the increase and the heritable deletion of nodes, which enables to depicting individual behaviors during an epidemic, e.g., population migration and indirect contacts. To model the above processes, we construct a Markovian queueing network and perform analyses for the variation of population size of different epidemic states. In simulations, we reveal how the population migration and indirect contacts caused by our network dynamic properties influence the population sizes of each epidemic state, and find that newly-created indirect contacts facilitate epidemic transmission.