No Arabic abstract
The success of a vaccination program is crucially dependent on its adoption by a critical fraction of the population, as the resulting herd immunity prevents future outbreaks of an epidemic. However, the effectiveness of a campaign can engender its own undoing if individuals choose to not get vaccinated in the belief that they are protected by herd immunity. Although this may appear to be an optimal decision, based on a rational appraisal of cost and benefits to the individual, it exposes the population to subsequent outbreaks. We investigate if voluntary vaccination can emerge in a an integrated model of an epidemic spreading on a social network of rational agents that make informed decisions whether to be vaccinated. The information available to each agent includes the prevalence of the disease in their local network neighborhood and/or globally in the population, as well as the fraction of their neighbors that are protected against the disease. Crucially, the payoffs governing the decision of agents evolve with disease prevalence, resulting in the co-evolution of vaccine uptake behavior with the spread of the contagion. The collective behavior of the agents responding to local prevalence can lead to a significant reduction in the final epidemic size, particularly for less contagious diseases having low basic reproduction number $R_0$. Near the epidemic threshold ($R_0approx1$) the use of local prevalence information can result in a dichotomous response in final vaccine coverage. The implications of our results suggest the nature of information used by individuals is a critical factor determining the success of public health intervention schemes that involve mass vaccination.
By incorporating delayed epidemic information and self-restricted travel behavior into the SIS model, we have investigated the coupled effects of timely and accurate epidemic information and peoples sensitivity to the epidemic information on contagion. In the population with only local random movement, whether the epidemic information is delayed or not has no effect on the spread of the epidemic. Peoples high sensitivity to the epidemic information leads to their risk aversion behavior and the spread of the epidemic is suppressed. In the population with only global person-to-person movement, timely and accurate epidemic information helps an individual cut off the connections with the infected in time and the epidemic is brought under control in no time. A delay in the epidemic information leads to an individuals misjudgment of who has been infected and who has not, which in turn leads to rapid progress and a higher peak of the epidemic. In the population with coexistence of local and global movement, timely and accurate epidemic information and peoples high sensitivity to the epidemic information play an important role in curbing the epidemic. A theoretical analysis indicates that peoples misjudgment caused by the delayed epidemic information leads to a higher encounter probability between the susceptible and the infected and peoples self-restricted travel behavior helps reduce such an encounter probability. A functional relation between the ratio of infected individuals and the susceptible-infected encounter probability has been found.
We investigate the effect of degree correlation on a susceptible-infected-susceptible (SIS) model with a nonlinear cooperative effect (synergy) in infectious transmissions. In a mean-field treatment of the synergistic SIS model on a bimodal network with tunable degree correlation, we identify a discontinuous transition that is independent of the degree correlation strength unless the synergy is absent or extremely weak. Regardless of synergy (absent or present), a positive and negative degree correlation in the model reduces and raises the epidemic threshold, respectively. For networks with a strongly positive degree correlation, the mean-field treatment predicts the emergence of two discontinuous jumps in the steady-state infected density. To test the mean-field treatment, we provide approximate master equations of the present model, which accurately describe the synergistic SIS dynamics. We quantitatively confirm all qualitative predictions of the mean-field treatment in numerical evaluations of the approximate master equations.
In this work, we address a multicoupled dynamics on complex networks with tunable structural segregation. Specifically, we work on a networked epidemic spreading under a vaccination campaign with agents in favor and against the vaccine. Our results show that such coupled dynamics exhibits a myriad of phenomena such as nonequilibrium transitions accompanied by bistability. Besides we observe the emergence of an intermediate optimal segregation level where the community structure enhances negative opinions over vaccination but counterintuitively hinders - rather than favoring - the global disease spreading. Thus, our results hint vaccination campaigns should avoid policies that end up segregating excessively anti-vaccine groups so that they effectively work as echo chambers in which individuals look to confirmation without jeopardising the safety of the whole population.
In the past few decades, the frequency of pandemics has been increased due to the growth of urbanization and mobility among countries. Since a disease spreading in one country could become a pandemic with a potential worldwide humanitarian and economic impact, it is important to develop models to estimate the probability of a worldwide pandemic. In this paper, we propose a model of disease spreading in a structural modular complex network (having communities) and study how the number of bridge nodes $n$ that connect communities affects disease spread. We find that our model can be described at a global scale as an infectious transmission process between communities with global infectious and recovery time distributions that depend on the internal structure of each community and $n$. We find that near the critical point as $n$ increases, the disease reaches most of the communities, but each community has only a small fraction of recovered nodes. In addition, we obtain that in the limit $n to infty$, the probability of a pandemic increases abruptly at the critical point. This scenario could make the decision on whether to launch a pandemic alert or not more difficult. Finally, we show that link percolation theory can be used at a global scale to estimate the probability of a pandemic since the global transmissibility between communities has a weak dependence on the global recovery time.
We develop a generalized group-based epidemic model (GgroupEM) framework for any compartmental epidemic model (for example; susceptible-infected-susceptible, susceptible-infected-recovered, susceptible-exposed-infected-recovered). Here, a group consists of a collection of individual nodes. This model can be used to understand the important dynamic characteristics of a stochastic epidemic spreading over very large complex networks, being informative about the state of groups. Aggregating nodes by groups, the state space becomes smaller than the individual-based approach at the cost of aggregation error, which is strongly bounded by the isoperimetric inequality. We also develop a mean-field approximation of this framework to further reduce the state-space size. Finally, we extend the GgroupEM to multilayer networks. Since the group-based framework is computationally less expensive and faster than an individual-based framework, then this framework is useful when the simulation time is important.