4 research outputs found
Stay with Your Community: Bridges between Clusters Trigger Expansion of COVID-19
The spreading of virus infection is here simulated over artificial human
networks. The real-space urban life of people is modeled as a modified
scale-free network with constraints. A scale-free network has been adopted in
several studies for modeling on-line communities so far but is modified here
for the aim to represent peoples' social behaviors where the generated
communities are restricted reflecting the spatiotemporal constraints in the
real life. Furthermore, the networks have been extended by introducing multiple
cliques in the initial step of network construction and enabling people to
zero-degree people as well as popular (large degree) people. As a result, four
findings and a policy proposal have been obtained. First, the "second waves"
occur without external influence or constraints on contacts or the releasing of
the constraints. These second waves, mostly lower than the first wave, implies
the bridges between infected and fresh clusters may trigger new expansions of
spreading. Second, if the network changes the structure on the way of infection
spreading or after its suppression, the peak of the second wave can be larger
than the first. Third, the peak height in the time series depends on the
difference between the upper bound of the number of people each member accepts
to meet and the number of people one chooses to meet. This tendency is observed
for two kinds of artificial networks and implies the impact of the bridges
between communities on the virus spreading. Fourth, the release of once given
constraint may trigger a second wave higher than the peak of the time series
without introducing any constraint from the beginning, if the release is
introduced at a time close to the peak. Thus, both governments and individuals
should be careful in returning to human society with inter-community contacts.Comment: 22 pages, 9 figures, 4 Tables. arXiv admin note: text overlap with
arXiv:2004.0937