Community lockdowns in social networks hardly mitigate epidemic spreading

Community lockdowns and travel restrictions are commonly employed to decelerate epidemic spreading. We here use a stochastic susceptible-infectious-recovered model on different social networks to determine when and to what degree such lockdowns are likely to be effective. Our research shows that community lockdowns are effective only if the links outside of the communities are virtually completely sealed off. The benefits of targeting specifically these links, as opposed to links uniformly at random across the whole network, are inferable only beyond 90% lockdown effectiveness. And even then the peak of the infected curve decreases by only 20% and its onset is delayed by a factor of 1.5. This holds for static and temporal social networks, regardless of their size and structural particularities. Networks derived from cell phone location data and online location-based social platforms yield the same results as a large family of hyperbolic geometric network models where characteristic path lengths, clustering, and community structure can be arbitrarily adjusted. The complex connectedness of modern human societies, which enables the ease of global communication and the lightning speeds at which news and information spread, thus makes it very difficult to halt epidemic spreading with top-down measures. We therefore emphasize the outstanding importance of endogenous self-isolation and social distancing for successfully arresting epidemic spreading.

Automated summary

Research indicates that community lockdowns are effective only when links outside the communities are virtually completely sealed off, with targeted lockdowns yielding better results than random lockdowns. However, even with over 90% lockdown effectiveness, the peak of the infected curve decreases by only 20% and its onset is delayed by a factor of 1.5.