  Major interventions have been introduced worldwide to slow down the spread of
the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Large-scale lockdowns of human movements are effective in
reducing the spread, but they come at a cost of significantly limited societal
functions. We show that natural human movements are statistically diverse, and
the spread of the disease is significantly influenced by a small group of
active individuals and gathering venues. We find that interventions focused on
these most mobile individuals and popular venues reduce both the peak infection
rate and the total infected population while retaining high social activity
levels. These trends are seen consistently in simulations with real human
mobility data of different scales, resolutions, and modalities from multiple
cities across the world. The observation implies that compared to broad
sweeping interventions, more heterogeneous strategies that are targeted based
on the network effects in human mobility provide a better balance between
pandemic control and regular social activities.
