Double-Edged Sword Effect of Social-Support on Epidemic Spreading on Correlated Multiplex Networks

Abstract

Social support is an essential part in suppressing the outbreak of serious infectious diseases. With the development of network science, how social support affects the dynamics of disease spreading on complex networks has now been more and more attracting and important topics. In this paper, we propose an epidemic model that considers the resource support from social neighbors of infected individuals based on social-contact multiplex networks. A bias parameter is introduced in the model to regulate the resource contribution strategy. Through extensive simulations, we find on both uncorrelated and correlated multiplex networks, there is always an optimal resource contribution strategy that can suppress the disease spreading to the maximum extent. Interestingly, the strategies of social support on social subnetwork has a so called double-edged sword effect on the dynamics of epidemic spreading. When disease transmission rate is relatively small, the nodes with small degrees in the social subnetwork should contributed more resources to suppress the disease spreading. While when transmission rate is large, the nodes with large degrees in the subnetworks should contributed more resources. When considering the inter-layer degree correlated, there is double edged sword effect of inter-layer degree correlation on dynamics of epidemic spreading.