Abstract
Past work has shown that models incorporating human travel can improve the quality of influenza forecasts. Here, we develop and validate a metapopulation model of twelve European countries, in which international translocation of virus is driven by observed commuting and air travel flows, and use this model to generate influenza forecasts in conjunction with incidence data from the World Health Organization. We find that, although the metapopulation model fits the data well, it offers no improvement over isolated models in forecast quality. We discuss several potential reasons for these results. In particular, we note the need for data that are more comparable from country to country, and offer suggestions as to how surveillance systems might be improved to achieve this goal.
Highlights
In recent years, multiple studies have demonstrated that skillful influenza forecasts can be generated for a range of cities and countries in both temperate [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8] and tropical [9,10] areas
We recently showed that freely available data from the World Health Organization (WHO) can be used to produce skillful forecasts of influenza activity for many European countries in isolation [29]
We found no significant differences between the performance of the network and isolated models for peak timing, peak intensity, or onset timing
Summary
Multiple studies have demonstrated that skillful influenza forecasts can be generated for a range of cities and countries in both temperate [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8] and tropical [9,10] areas. Commuting data must be requested directly from Eurostat (https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/help/ support)
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