Herd Immunity and Epidemic Size in Networks with Vaccination Homophily

Abstract

We study how the herd immunity threshold and the expected epidemic size depend on homophily with respect to vaccine adoption. We find that the presence of homophily considerably increases the critical vaccine coverage needed for herd immunity and that strong homophily can push the threshold entirely out of reach. The epidemic size monotonically increases as a function of homophily strength for a perfect vaccine, while it is maximized at a nontrivial level of homophily when the vaccine efficacy is limited. Our results highlight the importance of vaccination homophily in epidemic modeling.

12 pages, 9 figures

References in corpus (3)

• Epidemic Spreading and Digital Contact Tracing: Effects of Heterogeneous Mixing and Quarantine Failures
• Social distancing in pedestrian dynamics and its effect on disease spreading
• The impact of homophily on digital proximity tracing

Cited by in corpus (8)

• Directed Percolation in Temporal Networks
• Impact of assortative mixing by mask-wearing on the propagation of epidemics in networks
• Predicting the diversity of early epidemic spread on networks
• Spreading dynamics in networks under context-dependent behavior
• Effectiveness of Contact Tracing on Networks with Cliques
• Homophily Within and Across Groups
• Intersectional inequalities in social networks
• Strength and weakness of disease-induced herd immunity in networks