Epidemic Threshold in Temporally-Switching Networks

Abstract

Infectious diseases have been modelled on networks that summarise physical contacts or close proximity of individuals. These networks are known to be complex in both their structure and how they change over time. We present an overview of recent progress in numerically determining the epidemic threshold in temporally-switching networks, and illustrate that slower switching of snapshots relative to epidemic dynamics lowers the epidemic threshold. Therefore, ignoring the temporally-varying nature of networks may underestimate endemicity. We also identify a predictor for the magnitude of this shift which is based on the commutator norm of snapshot adjacency matrices.