Journal
JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY INTERFACE
Volume 15, Issue 138, Pages -Publisher
ROYAL SOC
DOI: 10.1098/rsif.2017.0783
Keywords
epidemiology; vaccination; disease transmission; digital networks; social networks; physical proximity
Categories
Funding
- Villum Foundation (Young Investigator Programme 'High Resolution Networks' grant)
- Danish Council for Independent Research (Sapere Aude Programme 'Micro dynamics of influence in social systems')
- University of Copenhagen (UCPH Excellence Programme for Interdisciplinary Research Social Fabric grant)
- Cornell Institute for Disease and Disaster Preparedness
- New York-Presbyterian Hospital
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Targeted vaccination, whether to minimize the forward transmission of infectious diseases or their clinical impact, is one of the 'holy grails' of modern infectious disease outbreak response, yet it is difficult to achieve in practice due to the challenge of identifying optimal targets in real time. If interruption of disease transmission is the goal, targeting requires knowledge of underlying person-to-person contact networks. Digital communication networks may reflect not only virtual but also physical interactions that could result in disease transmission, but the precise overlap between these cyber and physical networks has never been empirically explored in real-life settings. Here, we study the digital communication activity of more than 500 individuals along with their person-to-person contacts at a 5-min temporal resolution. We then simulate different disease transmission scenarios on the person-to-person physical contact network to determine whether cyber communication networks can be harnessed to advance the goal of targeted vaccination for a disease spreading on the network of physical proximity. We show that individuals selected on the basis of their closeness centrality within cyber networks (what we call 'cyber-directed vaccination') can enhance vaccination campaigns against diseases with short-range (but not full-range) modes of transmission.
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