Abstract
In recent years, serious infectious diseases tend to transcend national borders and widely spread in a global scale. The incidence and prevalence of epidemics are highly influenced not only by pathogen-dependent disease characteristics such as the force of infection, the latent period, and the infectious period, but also by human mobility and contact patterns. However, the effect of heterogeneous mobility of individuals on epidemic outcomes is not fully understood. Here, we aim to elucidate how spatial mobility of individuals contributes to the final epidemic size in a spatial susceptible-exposed-infectious-recovered (SEIR) model with mobile individuals in a square lattice. After illustrating the interplay between the mobility parameters and the other parameters on the spatial epidemic spreading, we propose an index as a function of system parameters, which largely governs the final epidemic size. The main contribution of this study is to show that the proposed index is useful for estimating how parameter scaling affects the final epidemic size. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed index, we show that there is a positive correlation between the proposed index computed with the real data of human airline travels and the actual number of positive incident cases of influenza B in the entire world, implying that the growing incidence of influenza B is attributed to increased human mobility.
Highlights
Pandemics are recognized as a serious threat and concern all over the world
We find that the distance that each infected individual moves during the latent and infectious periods plays a decisive role for the final epidemic size
We have investigated the spatial SEIR model with stochastic mobility of individuals on the square lattice to reveal how heterogeneous spatial mobility influences the final epidemic size
Summary
Pandemics are recognized as a serious threat and concern all over the world. To cope with this issue, considerable efforts have been made for investigating the mechanism of the spread of infectious diseases and finding possible control measures for preventing epidemic outbreaks. Recent epidemics are more likely to spread in a broad area than before, because of the effect of worldwide human mobility through a variety of transportation networks [1, 2]. Mathematical models have been a powerful tool to reveal the effect of human behaviour on epidemic spreading and examine the effectiveness of countermeasures against emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases. To study spatial spreading of epidemics which cannot be PLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0168127. To study spatial spreading of epidemics which cannot be PLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0168127 December 14, 2016
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