Fig. 6

Temporal quarantine strategy. Here we show the effect of quarantine strategy within cities (Fig. 5b) for different quarantine time windows \(t_q\). At time \(t_x = 30\) we temporally reduce \(K \rightarrow K^{\prime }\) within cities (black dashed line) and at time \(t_x + t_q\) remove the quarantine \(K^{\prime } \rightarrow K\). The quarantine window highly affects the final extent of the epidemic, \(\langle r_{max} \rangle _f\), and while early removal of the quarantine will result with the epidemic still propagating in the system, a finite quarantine window can completely stop the propagation of the disease with \(\langle r_{max} \rangle _f \approx \langle r_{max} \rangle _x\). Here we used \(\zeta = 100\), \(K = 4\), \(K^{\prime } = 3\), \(k_{inter} = 10^{-3}\), \(L = 1000\) and \(\beta = \beta ^{2D}_c = 0.407\)