We study the critical effect of an intermittent social distancing strategy on the propagation of epidemics in adaptive complex networks. We characterize the effect of our strategy in the framework of the susceptible-infected-recovered model. In our model, based on local information, a susceptible individual interrupts the contact with an infected individual with a probability $\sigma$ and restores it after a fixed time $t_b$. We find that, depending on the network topology, in our social distancing strategy there exists a cutoff threshold ${\sigma }_c$ beyond which the epidemic phase disappears. Our results are supported by a theoretical framework and extensive simulations of the model. Furthermore we show that this strategy is very efficient because it leads to a “susceptible herd behavior” that protects a large fraction of susceptible individuals. We explain our results using percolation arguments.

• Received 16 December 2011

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.85.036108