Complex Social Networks are Missing in the Dominant COVID-19 Epidemic Models

In the COVID-19 crisis, compartmental models have been largely used to predict the macroscopic dynamics of infections and deaths and to assess different non-pharmaceutical interventions aimed to contain the microscopic dynamics of person-to-person contagions. Evidence shows that the predictions of these models are affected by high levels of uncertainty. However, the link between predictions and interventions is rarely questioned and a critical scrutiny of the dependency of interventions on model assumptions is missing in public debate. In this article, I have examined the building blocks of compartmental epidemic models so influential in the current crisis. A close look suggests that these models can only lead to one type of intervention, i.e., interventions that indifferently concern large subsets of the population or even the overall population. This is because they look at virus diffusion without modelling the topology of social interactions. Therefore, they cannot assess any targeted interventions that could surgically isolate specific individuals and/or cutting particular person-to-person transmission paths. If complex social networks are seriously considered, more sophisticated interventions can be explored that apply to specific categories or set of individuals with expected collective benefits. In the last section of the article, I sketch a research agenda to promote a new generation of network-driven epidemic models.