R0 centrality based control of infectious diseases in commute network of Tokyo Metropolitan area

Identifying the epidemiological key-stone communities in a metapopulation network is primality important in designing efficient control against an infectious disease. Various network centrality measure commonly utilized for this purpose haven’t directly focused on the most important measure in epidemiology: the basic reproductive number, R0, of epidemiological dynamics on the network, which determines whether or not the infectious disease spreads over the whole network. We here introduce a new centrality measure, R0-centratliy, which quantifies how sensitive is the control in each local community to the reduction in R0 of the whole network. Our perturbation analysis then reveals that the largest local population in the network should have extremely large R0 centrality than the others, indicating that all the effort in control should be directed to the largest community. For example, when applied to the commute network of the Tokyo metropolitan area, we found that the impact of control at the largest daytime-population, that around Shinjuku station, is more than 1,000 times stronger than that at the second largest daytime-population, that around Tokyo station, even though the difference between population sizes are only 1.5 times between them.

Akira SASAKI

Department of Evolutionary Studies of Biosystems, The Graduate University for Advanced Studies, Sokendai, Japan.