Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is the first epidemic in human history in which digital contact tracing has been deployed at a global scale. Tracking and quarantining all the contacts of individuals who test positive for a virus can help slow down an epidemic, but the impact of contact tracing is severely limited by the generally low adoption of contact-tracing apps in the population. We derive here an analytical expression for the effectiveness of contact-tracing app installation strategies in a susceptible-infected-recovered (SIR) model on a given contact graph. We propose a decentralized heuristic to improve the effectiveness of contact tracing under fixed adoption rates, which targets a set of individuals to install contact-tracing apps and can be easily implemented. Simulations on a large number of real-world contact networks confirm that this heuristic represents a feasible alternative to the current state of the art.
Florent Gérard Krzakala, Lenka Zdeborová, Maria Refinetti, Indaco Biazzo, Giovanni Catania
Andrea Rinaldo, Cristiano Trevisin, Enrico Bertuzzo, Lorenzo Mari, Damiano Pasetto, Marino Gatto