Effect of Healthy Neighbors on Epidemic Spreading in Multiplex Networks

Suppressing the spreading of disease has been one of the most studied topics in recent years. The most effective way of constraining the spreading of disease is increasing the investment of public resources. However, the recovery of the infected populations are mainly depend on the support from neighbors other than the support from government. To this end, we consider a model of disease spreading on multiplex networks, where the recovery of the infected nodes are determined by the state of their neighborhoods in the social layer. We carried out extensive simulations and found that the inter-layer degree correlation can remarkably influence the spreading of disease. A positive correlation can enhance the disease spreading, while a negative correlation can suppress the disease spreading. Besides, the phase transition type can be altered by the degree correlation. Further, we find that the homogeneity of the degrees in social layer can enhance the disease spreading, while heterogeneity of the degrees can suppress the disease spreading.