Abstract
Epidemics can spread across large regions becoming pandemics by flowing along transportation and social networks. Two network attributes, transitivity (when a node is connected to two other nodes that are also directly connected between them) and centrality (the number and intensity of connections with the other nodes in the network), are widely associated with the dynamics of transmission of pathogens. Here we investigate how network centrality and transitivity influence vulnerability to diseases of human populations by examining one of the most devastating pandemic in human history, the fourteenth century plague pandemic called Black Death. We found that, after controlling for the city spatial location and the disease arrival time, cities with higher values of both centrality and transitivity were more severely affected by the plague. A simulation study indicates that this association was due to central cities with high transitivity undergo more exogenous re-infections. Our study provides an easy method to identify hotspots in epidemic networks. Focusing our effort in those vulnerable nodes may save time and resources by improving our ability of controlling deadly epidemics.
Highlights
Transmission to humans is believed to have occurred mostly through the action of some vectors, the Oriental rat fleas (Xenopsylla cheopsis) living on the black rats (Rattus rattus)[2,25]
The studied network included information on 2084 trade and pilgrimage connections between 1311 Old World cities, with 1013 cities being connected by trading routes and 403 cities connected by pilgrimage routes, with some cities appearing in both trade and pilgrimage routes (Fig. 1; Supplementary Table S1)
Our study provides quantitative support based on different network structural measures about a functional connection between the position of nodes in a network and their vulnerability to pandemics
Summary
Transmission to humans is believed to have occurred mostly through the action of some vectors, the Oriental rat fleas (Xenopsylla cheopsis) living on the black rats (Rattus rattus)[2,25]. As occurring in biological parasite networks, the centrality and local transitivity of the human settlements (cities, hereafter) in the medieval network would be positively associated to their vulnerability to the Black Death. We propose that this relationship is mediated by a higher probability of re-infection of those cities having higher centrality and transitivity. To test this idea, we 1) built the medieval network and empirically explored the relationship between the network attributes of the cities and their mortality due to the Black Death, and 2) simulated how often a city is reached by the disease as a consequence of its position in the medieval network
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