Quarantines as a Targeted Immunization Strategy
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In the context of the recent COVID-19 outbreak, quarantine has been used to "flatten the curve" and slow the spread of the disease.In this paper, we show that this is not the only benefit of quarantine for the mitigation of an SIR epidemic spreading on a graph. Indeed, we theoretically prove that nodes of high-degree are disproportionately in the Removed state after a first wave of infection, which has very positive consequences. In particular, powerlaw graphs do not retain their structure after a few waves of infection, which implies second and third waves may be of much smaller amplitude than the first wave. We propose an opening and closing strategy aiming at immunizing the graph while infecting the minimum number of individuals, while guaranteeing the population is now robust to future infections. We experimentally verify our results on simulated networks.
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