Discontinuous epidemic transition due to limited testing

Abstract

High impact epidemics constitute one of the largest threats humanity is facing in the 21st century. Testing, contact tracing and quarantining are critical in slowing down epidemic dynamics, but may prove insufficient for highly contagious diseases. In the absence of pharmaceutical interventions, physical distancing measures remain as the last resort to avoid a widespread outbreak. Here we show that such combined countermeasures drastically change the rules of the epidemic transition if testing capacities are limited: Instead of continuous the response to countermeasures becomes discontinuous and rather than following the conventional exponential growth, the outbreak accelerates and scales super-exponentially during an intermediate period. As a consequence, containment measures either suffice to stop the outbreak at low total case numbers or fail catastrophically if marginally too weak, thus implying large uncertainties in reliably estimating overall epidemic dynamics, both during initial phases and during second wave scenarios.

References in corpus (2)

• Self-organized adaptation of a simple neural circuit enables complex robot behaviour
• Impact of Single Links in Competitive Percolation -- How complex networks grow under competition

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Optimal test-kit based intervention strategy of epidemic spreading in heterogeneous complex networks
• Collapse transition in epidemic spreading subject to detection with limited resources
• Transition from Susceptible-Infected to Susceptible-Infected-Recovered Dynamics in a Susceptible-Cleric-Zombie-Recovered Active Matter Model
• Superexponential growth of epidemics in networks with cliques
• Abrupt transition of the efficient vaccination strategy in a population with heterogeneous fatality rates
• An autonomous compartmental model for accelerating epidemics