Spatial epidemiology of networked metapopulation: An overview

Lin WANG; Xiang Li

This meaningful finding has motivated the research of network epidemiology, which concerns particularly the spreading of epidemics in human social networks [4, 14, 47] . Many subsequent works investigated extensively the epidemic threshold on networks with special topological features, such as degree correlations [48] , small world [49] , community [50] , edge length [51] , and K-core [52] . [53, 54] demonstrated that the vanishing epidemic threshold of the SIS model derives from the active behavior of the largest hub, which acts as a self-sustained source of the infection. Such disastrous effect of highly connected hubs can also be observed in reality, such as the presence of core groups in the propagation of sexually transmitted diseases, and the appearance of the patient zero that induces the dissemination of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). Considering that the threshold condition generally predicts the final state of the epidemic evolution, Li and Wang [49] studied the relaxation behavior of epidemic spreading before reaching a final disease-free or endemic phase.