An investigation of the combined effect of an annual mass gathering event and seasonal infectiousness on disease outbreak

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the effects of recurring mass gathering event on the spread of an epidemic. Mass gatherings take place when a large number of people from different locations visit a particular region during a short time period. Such activity plays a crucial role in the epidemic spread as traveling facilitates the spread of an epidemic between disparate locations and crowded conditions can accelerate the disease transmission.An additional component that affects disease spread is the seasonality in transmission. In this paper, we study the interplay between the periodic natures of seasonal transmission and of an annual mass gathering event. We find that the timing of the gathering relative to the peak in transmissibility can have a profound impact on the likelihood of an outbreak.