Efficiency of quarantine and self-protection processes in epidemic spreading control on scale-free networks

"One of the most effective mechanisms to contain the spread of an infectious disease through a population is the implementation of quarantine policies. However, its efficiency is affected by different aspects, for example, the structure of the underlining social network where highly connected i...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: JOSE DE JESUS ESQUIVEL GOMEZ, JUAN GONZALO BARAJAS RAMIREZ
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Estado:Versión enviada para evaluación y publicación
Fecha de publicación:2018
País:México
Institución:Instituto Potosino de Investigación Científica y Tecnológica
Repositorio:Repositorio Institucional del IPICYT
OAI Identifier:oai:ipicyt.repositorioinstitucional.mx:1010/1710
Acceso en línea:http://ipicyt.repositorioinstitucional.mx/jspui/handle/1010/1710
Access Level:acceso embargado
Palabra clave:info:eu-repo/classification/Autor/Complex networks
info:eu-repo/classification/Autor/Model
info:eu-repo/classification/cti/1
info:eu-repo/classification/cti/12
Descripción
Sumario:"One of the most effective mechanisms to contain the spread of an infectious disease through a population is the implementation of quarantine policies. However, its efficiency is affected by different aspects, for example, the structure of the underlining social network where highly connected individuals are more likely to become infected; therefore, the speed of the transmission of the decease is directly determined by the degree distribution of the network. Another aspect that influences the effectiveness of the quarantine is the self-protection processes of the individuals in the population, that is, they try to avoid contact with potentially infected individuals. In this paper, we investigate the efficiency of quarantine and self-protection processes in preventing the spreading of infectious diseases over complex networks with a power-law degree distribution [PðkÞ k] for different values. We propose two alternative scale-free models that result in power-law degree distributions above and below the exponent ¼ 3 associated with the conventional Barabasi-Albert model. Our results show that the exponent determines the effectiveness of these policies in controlling the spreading process. More precisely, we show that for the exponent below three, the quarantine mechanism loses effectiveness. However, the efficiency is improved if the quarantine is jointly implemented with a self-protection process driving the number of infected individuals significantly lower."