How disease spread dynamics evolve over time

Abstract

The recent outbreak of coronavirus disease has demonstrated that physical human interactions and modern movement paradigms are the principle drivers for the rapid spatial spread of infectious diseases. Modelling the impact of human mobility is crucial to understand the underlying dynamics of disease spread and consequently to develop effective containment and control strategies. While previous studies have investigated the impact of specific mobility profiles on the spreading dynamics of infectious diseases, they used either highly aggregated spatio-temporal data or portions of datasets that span a short period of time. These limitations do not allow to study how the influence of different mobility aspects on the spread changes as a disease outbreak progresses. In this paper we use large-scale comprehensive human mobility traces to study the impact of the latent period on the spreading dynamics of diseases. In addition, we provide a detailed analysis of how the spreading power of different mobility profiles changes over time. We propose an approach that analyses the behaviour of the individuals' spreading power as time progresses. Through extensive disease spread simulations we uncover a population influence homogeneity threshold, defined by a percentage of the population at which the identified mobility groups become equally influential to the spread.