The role of directionality, heterogeneity and correlations in epidemic risk and spread

Most models of epidemic spread, including many designed specifically for COVID-19, implicitly assume that social networks are undirected, i.e., that the infection is equally likely to spread in either direction whenever a contact occurs. In particular, this assumption implies that the individuals most likely to spread the disease are also the most likely to receive it from others. Here, we review results from the theory of random directed graphs which show that many important quantities, including the reproductive number and the epidemic size, depend sensitively on the joint distribution of in- and out-degrees (“risk” and “spread”), including their heterogeneity and the correlation between them. By considering joint distributions of various kinds we elucidate why some types of heterogeneity cause a deviation from the standard Kermack-McKendrick analysis of SIR models, i.e., so called mass-action models where contacts are homogeneous and random, and some do not. We also show that some structured SIR models informed by complex contact patterns among types of individuals (age or activity) are simply mixtures of Poisson processes and tend not to deviate significantly from the simplest mass-action model. Finally, we point out some possible policy implications of this directed structure, both for contact tracing strategy and for interventions designed to prevent superspreading events. In particular, directed networks have a forward and backward version of the classic “friendship paradox” — forward links tend to lead to individuals with high risk, while backward links lead to individuals with high spread — such that a combination of both forward and backward contact tracing is necessary to find superspreading events and prevent future cascades of infection.