Epidemic paradox induced by awareness driven network dynamics

Abstract

We study stationary epidemic processes in scale-free networks with local awareness behavior adopted by only susceptible, only infected, or all nodes. We find that while the epidemic size in the susceptible-aware and the all-aware scenarios scales linearly with the network size, the scaling becomes sublinear in the infected-aware scenario, suggesting that fewer aware nodes may reduce the epidemic size more effectively. We explain this paradox via numerical and theoretical analysis, and highlight the role of influential nodes and their disassortativity to raise awareness in epidemic scenarios.