Healthcare Associated Infectious Disease Control using Person-to-Person Contact Network

Abstract

An effective approach to containing epidemic outbreaks (e.g., COVID-19) is targeted immunization, which involves identifying “super spreaders” who play a key role in spreading disease over human contact networks. The ultimate goal of targeted immunization and other disease control strategies is to minimize the impact of outbreaks. It shares similarity with the famous influence maximization problem studied in the field of social network analysis, whose objective is to identify a group of influential individuals to maximize the influence spread over social networks. This study aims to establish the equivalence of the two problems and develop an effective methodology for targeted immunization through the use of influence maximization.