Traffic-Driven Epidemic Spreading in Networks: Considering the Transition of Infection From Being Mild to Severe

Realistic epidemic spreading is usually driven by traffic flow in networks, which is not captured in classic diffusion models. Moreover, the progress of a node's infection from mild to severe phase has not been particularly addressed in previous epidemic modeling. To address these issues, we propose a novel traffic-driven epidemic spreading model by introducing a new epidemic state, that is, the severe state, which characterizes the serious infection of a node different from the initial mild infection. We derive the dynamic equations of our model with the tools of individual-based mean-field approximation and continuous-time Markov chain. We find that, besides infection and recovery rates, the epidemic threshold of our model is determined by the largest real eigenvalue of a communication frequency matrix we construct. Finally, we study how the epidemic spreading is influenced by representative distributions of infection control resources. In particular, we observe that the uniform and Weibull distributions of control resources, which have very close performance, are much better than the Pareto distribution in suppressing the epidemic spreading.