Rapid decay in the relative efficiency of quarantine to halt epidemics on networks

Several recent studies have tackled the issue of optimal network immunization, by providing efficient criteria to identify key nodes to be removed in order to break apart a network, thus preventing the occurrence of extensive outbreaks. Yet, although the efficiency of those criteria has been demonstrated also in empirical networks, preventive immunization is rarely applied to real world scenarios, where the usual approach is the a posteriori attempt to contain epidemic outbreaks based on quarantine. Here we compare the efficiency of prevention with that of quarantine in terms of tradeoff between the number of removed and saved nodes on both synthetic networks with different degree distributions, and on the global airline transportation network. We show how, consistent with common sense but contrary to common practice, preventing is almost always better than curing: rescuing an infected network by quarantine becomes inefficient soon after the first infection.

STRONA Giovanni;  CLAUDIO Castellano; 

2018-03-06

AMER PHYSICAL SOC

JRC107075

2470-0045,   

https://journals.aps.org/pre/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevE.97.022308,    https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC107075,   

10.1103/PhysRevE.97.022308,