Epidemic paradox induced by awareness driven network dynamics
Physics and Society
2025-03-07 v2 Social and Information Networks
Abstract
We study stationary epidemic processes in scale-free networks with local awareness behavior adopted by only susceptible, only infected, or all nodes. We find that while the epidemic size in the susceptible-aware and the all-aware models scales linearly with the network size, the scaling becomes sublinear in the infected-aware model. Hence, fewer aware nodes may reduce the epidemic size more effectively; a phenomenon reminiscent of Braess's paradox. We present numerical and theoretical analysis, and highlight the role of influential nodes and their disassortativity to raise epidemic awareness.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2409.01384,
title = {Epidemic paradox induced by awareness driven network dynamics},
author = {Csegő Balázs Kolok and Gergely Ódor and Dániel Keliger and Márton Karsai},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2409.01384},
year = {2025}
}