Social Confinement and Mesoscopic Localization of Epidemics on Networks
Guillaume St-Onge, Vincent Thibeault, Antoine Allard, Louis J. Dubé, Laurent Hébert‐Dufresne
Abstract
Recommendations around epidemics tend to focus on individual behaviors, with much less efforts attempting to guide event cancellations and other collective behaviors since most models lack the higher-order structure necessary to describe large gatherings. Through a higher-order description of contagions on networks, we model the impact of a blanket cancellation of events larger than a critical size and find that epidemics can suddenly collapse when interventions operate over groups of individuals rather than at the level of individuals. We relate this phenomenon to the onset of mesoscopic localization, where contagions concentrate around dominant groups.