Pandemic propagation of COVID-19 motivated us to discuss the impact of the human network clustering on epidemic spreading. Today, there are two clustering mechanisms which prevent of uncontrolled disease propagation in a connected network: an “internal” clustering, which mimics self-isolation (SI) in local naturally arranged communities, and an “external” clustering, which looks like a sharp frontiers closing (FC) between cities and countries, and which does not care about the natural connections of network agents. SI networks are “evolutionarily grown” under the condition of maximization of small cliques in the entire network, while FC networks are instantly created. Running the standard SIR model on clustered SI and FC networks, we demonstrate that the evolutionary grown clustered network prevents the spread of an epidemic better than the instantly clustered network with similar parameters. We find that SI networks have the scale-free property for the degree distribution $P\left(k\right)\sim k^{\eta }$, with a small critical exponent $-2<\eta <-1$. We argue that the scale-free behavior emerges as a result of the randomness in the initial degree distributions.

• Received 7 April 2020
• Accepted 23 June 2020

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.102.010401