An Extended Epidemic Model on Interconnected Networks for COVID-19 to Explore the Epidemic Dynamics

Deng, Ou; Tago, Kiichi; Jin, Qun

COVID-19 has resulted in a public health global crisis. The pandemic control necessitates epidemic models that capture the trends and impacts on infectious individuals. Many exciting models can implement this but they lack practical interpretability. This study combines the epidemiological and network theories and proposes a framework with causal interpretability in response to this issue. This framework consists of an extended epidemic model in interconnected networks and a dynamic structure that has major human mobility. The networked causal analysis focuses on the stochastic processing mechanism. It highlights the social infectivity as the intervention estimator between the observable effect (the number of daily new cases) and unobservable causes (the number of infectious persons). According to an experiment on the dataset for Tokyo metropolitan areas, the computational results indicate the propagation features of the symptomatic and asymptomatic infectious persons. These new spatiotemporal findings can be beneficial for policy decision making.