Contact tracing and epidemics control in social networks

A generalization of the standard susceptible-infectious-removed (SIR) stochastic model for epidemics in sparse random networks is introduced which incorporates contact tracing in addition to random screening. We propose a deterministic mean-field description which yields quantitative agreement with stochastic simulations on random graphs. We also analyze the role of contact tracing in epidemics control in small-world networks and show that its effectiveness grows as the rewiring probability is reduced.