Modeling risk of infectious diseases: a case of Coronavirus outbreak in four countries

Md. Mazharul Islam; Md. Monirul Islam; Md. Jamal Hossain; Faroque Ahmed

Area specific component estimates the risk of infectious diseases posed by the factors such as the number of identified cases, population size, and case identification rate. We also consider mobility-interaction factor to estimate the risk of spreading infectious diseases as mobility and interaction among people contribute to spread infectious diseases according to some studies [6] [7] [8] . So, it is expected that the higher the mobility and interaction among people in an area, the higher the risk of spreading infectious diseases. We can call it "Mobility-Interaction Effect". The reasoning behind such hypothesis is that people have the tendency to amass in an area which provides better environment, livelihood, education, and other amenities. The aggregation process continues further with the economic development, forcing people to move low density areas to high density areas. As a result, people living in high density areas have higher mobility and interaction among themselves than the people living in low density areas [9] . Therefore, we propose that Relative Mobility-Interaction Effect (RMIE) can be estimated by the relative population density of that area within a country.