What Social Policy Is Better: Lockdowns or Borders Closings During SARS-CoV-2 Pandemic?

Abstract

Currently, two main social policies are used by different governments to prevent the uncontrolled spreading of COVID-19, lockdowns, or “self-isolation” and borders closings. In both cases, the aim of clustering population is to localise the illness propagation in closed communities and prevent it from spread through the entire human network. In the Chapter, we discuss which mechanism better blocks the spread of the epidemic: self-quarantine in local communities induced by increasing the weights of small cliques in the human network or sharp clustering via closing of borders between arbitrary parts of the human network. In an ideal situation, when all self-isolated communities are absolutely disconnected from each other, and when the border crossings between cities and countries are totally prohibited, both protocols are equally efficient and definitely inhibit disease expansion. However, in reality, it is impossible to isolate people’s communities completely and some fraction of cross-community connections is always present. In that case, we claim that the human network clustering obtained by self-isolation better prevents the spread of the epidemic than the instant separation of the network into the clusters.