However, all the 2,561 nodes identified in the estimation process are important, because they are on the transmission paths for nearly all epidemics. As suggested by the referee, removing all these nodes may bring the infection network below its percolation threshold, thereby completely stopping all epidemics. To test this idea, we isolated the 2,561 nodes on the actual network and ran 100 SIR simulations. We found that in about 40 simulations, the 'epidemics' infected only 2-5 nodes and died off very quickly after 1 or 2 time steps after starting. For the other 60 simulations, we observe very slowly circulating epidemics that lasted more than 60 time steps and infected 2,580 nodes on average, with the number of incidences reaching a peak of 116 cases 28 time steps after the start.