A novel room-based epidemic model: Quarantine, testing, and vaccination strategies

Epidemic outbreaks pose significant challenges to public health and socio-economic stability, necessitating a comprehensive understanding of disease transmission dynamics and effective control strategies. This article discusses the limitations of traditional compartmental and network-based models and, inspired by the opinion formation models, introduces a room-based model that incorporates social gatherings and intuitive quarantine measures. Through simulations and analysis, we examine the impact of various model parameters, and confinement measures like quarantine and preventive measures like testing, and vaccination on disease spread. Additionally, we explore centrality-based testing and immunization strategies, demonstrating their effectiveness in reducing the spread of diseases compared to a random approach. Finally, we propose a combined strategy, that outperforms the existing strategies. It takes both global and local properties of the network structure into account, highlighting the potential for integrated control measures in epidemic management. This research not only contributes to a deeper understanding of epidemic models, but also provides insights into devising successful intervention strategies, including quarantine measures, testing methodologies, and vaccine programs to combat emerging epidemics and pandemics.