The study “Using a real-world network to model the trade-off between stay-at-home restriction, vaccination, social distancing and working hours on COVID-19 dynamics” led by ITU Department of Mathematics member Prof. Dr. Murat Sari was published in “PeerJ”.

Human behavior, economic activity, vaccination, and social distancing are inseparably entangled in epidemic management. This study aims to investigate the effects of various parameters such as stay-at-home restrictions, work hours, vaccination and social distance on the containment of pandemics such as COVID-19.

To achieve this, an agent-based model based on a time-dynamic graph with stochastic transmission events is developed. The graph is constructed from a real-world social network.  The conditions needed to mitigate the spread of wild-type (WT) COVID-19 and the delta variant have been analyzed.