Epidemics on networks: Reducing disease transmission using health emergency declarations and peer communication

Azizi, Asma; Montalvo, Cesar; Espinoza, Baltazar; Kang, Yun; Castillo-Chavez, Carlos

After generating the network (Bollob as et al., 2003; ERDdS & R&WI, 1959; Newman & Watts, 1999) , we assign some attributes to the nodes (individuals) as follows: each node i is associated with a random variable x i 2½0; 1, generated from a beta-distribution, denoting the level of education of individual i, values closer to 0 corresponding to higher levels of education while those close to 1 indicate limited education, an individual i is assigned a random number from a beta distribution with shape parameters a and b. The underlying network G is weighted, where the weight 0 < c ij 1 for edge ij is the probability, of physical contact between neighbors i and j on any specific day. We assume that the values c ij are randomly generated from a uniform distribution U ½0:5;1. For example if c ij ¼ 5 7 , that means that these two neighbors meet with probability 5 7 and do not meet with probability 2 7 on a specific day. We also assume that there are no birth or deaths in the population of nodes or edges, during the epidemic outbreak.