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Strategy to Stop a Pandemic

Prof. Shlomo Havlin of BIU’s Dept. of Physics has coauthored a study presenting a new approach for effective use of scarce vaccine supplies. Computer simulations demonstrate that targeting vaccinations to selected people could block a pandemic from spreading along the network of social interactions while using up to 50 percent fewer doses than existing approaches.

“The strategy is to disintegrate the network,” says Prof. Havlin, who together with his colleagues, presented these findings in the prestigious scientific journal Physical Review Letters. “This method could also offer a cost-effective way of blocking the spread of computer viruses on the Internet, or breaking up a terrorist network.”

In one of the most dramatic illustrations of their technique, Prof. Havlin and his fellow researchers simulated the spread of a pandemic using data from a Swedish study of social connections. In this study, more than 310,000 people are represented and connected based on whether they live in the same household or work in the same place. With the new method, the epidemic spread to about 4 percent of the population, compared to nearly 40 percent for more standard strategies.