Suppressing Epidemics with a Limited Amount of Immunization Units

Understand

The way diseases spread through schools, epidemics through countries, and viruses through the Internet is crucial in determining their risk.

• Although each of these threats has its own characteristics, its underlying network determines the spreading.
• To restrain the spreading, a widely used approach is the fragmentation of these networks through immunization, so that epidemics cannot spread.
• Here we develop an immunization approach based on optimizing the susceptible size, which outperforms the best known strategy based on immunizing the highest-betweenness links or nodes.