Intervention of resource allocation strategies on spatial spread of epidemics

Medical resources are crucial in mitigating epidemics, especially during pandemics such as the ongoing COVID-19. Thereby, reasonable resource deployment inevitably plays a significant role in suppressing the epidemic under limited resources. When an epidemic breaks out, people can produce resources for self-protection or donate resources to help others for treatment. That is, the exchange of resources also affects the transmission between individuals, thus, altering the epidemic dynamics. To understand factors on resource deployment and the interplay between resource and transmission we construct a metapopulation network model with resource allocation. Our results indicate actively or promptly donating resources is not helpful to suppress the epidemic under both homogeneous population distribution and heterogeneous population distribution. Besides, strengthening the speed of resources production can significantly increase the recovery rate so that they reduce the final outbreak size. These results may provide policy guidance toward epidemic containment.

Automated summary

Reasonable resource allocation is crucial in controlling epidemics, and donating resources may not effectively suppress the outbreak. However, increasing the speed of resource production can reduce the final outbreak size.