Minimizing Epidemic Viral Total Exposure under the Droplet and Aerosol Models

Abstract

In recent years, especially after the Coronavirus pandemic, extensive research has been conducted to propose models for the spread of viruses in social networks, and to come up with viable techniques to reduce the propagation of viruses. In this paper, we propose a new general time-evolving graph model that is suitable to be applied to viral spread propagation studies. Furthermore, with a focus on a rare type of infecting mode called the aerosol model, which turns out to be one of COVID's transmission types, we study the simple problem of minimizing the total exposure of a virus within a group of people that visit a place or set of places successively. An extensive simulation is conducted to examine the efficiency of our viral-minimizing spread technique and to compare it to other possible scenarios of the behavior of the population.