The accelerated infectious disease risk in the Anthropocene: more outbreaks and wider global spread

Serge Morand; Bruno Andreas Walther

Centrality is defined as the degree of the connectedness of a node (e.g., a keystone species in ecological studies; Jordán, 2009; González et al., 2010) . In the context of our study, centrality is the degree of the connectedness of a country and those countries connected to it. We estimated the countries which are the potential centres of disease outbreaks by investigating the eigenvector centrality of a given country in a network of countries which share disease outbreaks among each other. Eigenvector centrality is a generalization of degree centrality, which is the number of connections a country has to other countries in terms of sharing disease outbreaks. Eigenvector centrality considers countries to be highly central if the connected countries to them through shared outbreaks are connected to many other well-connected countries (Bonacich and Lloyd, 2001; Wells et al., 2020) .