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How the reversible change of contact networks affects the epidemic spreading

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Abstract

During the early outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the mobility patterns of individuals in many regions in China exhibit notable changes: initially, there was a significant reduction in mobility, followed by a gradual recovery. Based on this observation, here we study epidemic models on a particular type of time-varying network where the links undergo a freeze-recovery process. We first focus on an isolated network and find that the recovery mechanism could lead to the resurgence of an epidemic, while the influence of link freezing on epidemic dynamics is intricate. In particular, we show that the final epidemic size is a non-monotonous function of the freezing rate. This result challenges our conventional idea that stricter prevention measures (corresponding to a larger freezing rate) could always have a better inhibitory effect on epidemic spreading. We further investigate an open system where a fraction of nodes in the network may contract the disease from the “environment” (the outside infected sources). In this case, a second wave can emerge even if the number of infected nodes has declined to zero, which cannot be explained by the isolated network model.

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Notes

  1. https://ncov.dxy.cn/.

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Acknowledgements

This work was partially supported by the Zhejiang Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China under Grants Nos. LY21F030017 and LR19F030001, by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 61973273, and by the Key R &D Programs of Zhejiang under Grant No. 2022C01018.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Cyberspace Security, Zhejiang University of Technology, Hangzhou, 310023, China

    Xincheng Shu & Zhongyuan Ruan

  2. Department of Electrical Engineering, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, 999077, China

    Xincheng Shu

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  1. Xincheng Shu
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Correspondence to Zhongyuan Ruan.

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Shu, X., Ruan, Z. How the reversible change of contact networks affects the epidemic spreading. Nonlinear Dyn 112, 731–739 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11071-023-09078-2

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