  Assessing and managing the impact of large-scale epidemics considering only
the individual risk and severity of the disease is exceedingly difficult and
could be extremely expensive. Economic consequences, infrastructure and service
disruption, as well as the recovery speed, are just a few of the many
dimensions along which to quantify the effect of an epidemic on society's
fabric. Here, we extend the concept of resilience to characterize epidemics in
structured populations, by defining the system-wide critical functionality that
combines an individual's risk of getting the disease (disease attack rate) and
the disruption to the system's functionality (human mobility deterioration). By
studying both conceptual and data-driven models, we show that the integrated
consideration of individual risks and societal disruptions under resilience
assessment framework provides an insightful picture of how an epidemic might
impact society. In particular, containment interventions intended for a
straightforward reduction of the risk may have net negative impact on the
system by slowing down the recovery of basic societal functions. The presented
study operationalizes the resilience framework, providing a more nuanced and
comprehensive approach for optimizing containment schemes and mitigation
policies in the case of epidemic outbreaks.
