Superexponential growth of epidemics in networks with cliques

Abstract

Many dynamic processes on complex networks, from disease outbreaks to cascading failures, can rapidly accelerate once a critical threshold is exceeded, potentially leading to severe social and economic costs. Therefore, in order to develop effective mitigation strategies, it is essential to understand how these catastrophic events occur. In this work, we investigate the dynamic of disease propagation on networks with fully connected sub-graphs (or cliques) using a susceptibleinfected-quarantined (SIQ) model, and considering a scenario in which only a proportion f of the population has access to testing. For this model, we derive the time-evolution equations governing the spread of epidemics and show that the final proportion of infected individuals undergoes a sudden transition at a critical threshold fc. Moreover, close to this transition point, our results on the time evolution of the SIQ model reveal that the number of new cases can exhibit a faster-than-exponential growth. This accelerated spread dynamics is more likely to occur in networks with larger cliques.