2021/12/14 by Takayuki Hiraoka, Hiraoka, Takayuki, Abbas K. Rizi +5 · 1 voice · 2 citations
Mathematics · Medicine · Physics and Astronomy · #COVID-19 epidemiological studies #Complex Network Analysis Techniques #Mathematical and Theoretical Epidemiology and Ecology Models
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physreve.105.l052301
openalex publication_date 2022/05/12 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
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.