Strong Dependence of Infection Profiles on Grouping Dynamics during Epidemiological Spreading

The spreading of an epidemic depends on the connectivity of the underlying host population. Because of the inherent difficulties in addressing such a problem, research to date on epidemics in networks has focused either on static networks, or networks with relatively few rewirings per timestep. Here we employ a simple, yet highly non-trivial, model of dynamical grouping to investigate the extent to which the underlying dynamics of tightly-knit communities can affect the resulting infection profile. Individual realizations of the spreading tend to be dominated by large peaks corresponding to infection resurgence, and a generally slow decay of the outbreak. In addition to our simulation results, we provide an analytical analysis of the run-averaged behaviour in the regime of fast grouping dynamics. We show that the true run-averaged infection profile can be closely mimicked by employing a suitably weighted static network, thereby dramatically simplifying the level of difficulty.