The impact of contact structure and mixing on control measures and disease-induced herd immunity in epidemic models: a mean-field model perspective (Q2051440)

In this paper, the authors study the effect of the contact structure and mixing on control measures and disease-induced herd immunity. An important observation is that unlike in unstructured models where once a fraction \(1-1/\mathcal{R}_0\) has been infected, the epidemic cannot persist longer, in structured models it is possible that this threshold is crossed with a smaller fraction of infected, as the disease behaves like a targeted vaccine, immunising higher-risk individuals with a greater role in spread. The authors study various types of small-scale structures of contact networks on disease-induced herd immunity analysing some well-known mean-field models of epidemics on networks showing that increased degree heterogeneity leads to disease-induced herd immunity with much fewer infections than equivalent models with less or no degree heterogeneity. If the intervention is introduced as a change in the contact network, then this effect may become much more subtle. An age-structured compartmental model is applied comparing lockdown periods implemented either as a global scaling of the mixing matrix or age-specific structural changes. The authors find that herd immunity strongly depends on the model, the duration of the lockdown and the implementation of lockdown in the model.