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  • Letter
  • Open Access

Herd immunity and epidemic size in networks with vaccination homophily

Takayuki Hiraoka*, Abbas K. Rizi, Mikko Kivelä, and Jari Saramäki

  • Department of Computer Science, Aalto University, 00076 Espoo, Finland

  • *takayuki.hiraoka@aalto.fi
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Phys. Rev. E 105, L052301 – Published 12 May, 2022

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.105.L052301

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.

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Phys. Rev. E 105, L052301– Published 12 May, 2022
  • Received 21 December 2021
  • Accepted 26 April 2022
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI.

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