Influencers as Superspreaders of Disease

On December 2019 the COVID-19 pandemic stroke the world from a cluster of initial patients in Wuhan, China. In the absence of vaccines or treatments, governments worldwide implemented lockdowns to halt the spread of the pandemic, triggering large social and economic disruptions. Unfortunately, the massive lockdowns did not stop the spread of the disease. In this chapter we elaborate on the possibility to implement intelligent quarantines. Intelligent quarantines are isolation strategies that use available digital technologies—contact tracing, AI and influencer network theory—to identify and isolate superspreaders of disease. Intelligent quarantines leave all the work to intelligent machines rather than humans, who have had a hard time implementing successful strategies against the disease. Influencer theory shows that intelligent targeted quarantines are possible to stop efficiently the spread of the disease, in conjunction with global quarantines. They key is to identify the set of superspreadersSuperspreader using the algorithms of Chap.  1 .