Epidemic control in networks with cliques

Social units, such as households and schools, can play an important role in controlling epidemic outbreaks. In this work, we study an epidemic model with a prompt quarantine measure on networks with cliques (a clique is a fully connected subgraph representing a social unit). According to this strategy, newly infected individuals are detected and quarantined (along with their close contacts) with probability f. Numerical simulations reveal that epidemic outbreaks in networks with cliques are abruptly suppressed at a transition point f(c). However, small outbreaks show features of a second-order phase transition around f(c). Therefore, our model can exhibit properties of both discontinuous and continuous phase transitions. Next, we show analytically that the probability of small outbreaks goes continuously to 1 at f(c) in the thermodynamic limit. Finally, we find that our model exhibits a backward bifurcation phenomenon.