Spatial epidemiology of networked metapopulation: An overview

Lin WANG; Xiang Li

To study the dynamical differences between the reactioncommuting and the reaction-diffusion processes, Belik et al. [98] analyzed their respective traveling wave solutions on the one dimensional lattice. As the diffusion rate increases, spatially constrained human commuting generates a saturated threshold of the wave front velocity, whereas the reactiondiffusion model has an unbounded front velocity threshold. Such distinction implies that the estimation of transmission speed might be overestimated under the reaction-diffusion framework. Besides, they have also found that the character-istic sojourn time spent by commuters induces a novel epidemic threshold. Since airline traffic and ground commuting networks both serve human routine transportation, Balcan et al. [94] developed a multiscale networked metapopulation model, where the commuting networks in about 30 countries were embedded into the worldwide long-range air transportation network. The introduction of short-range commuting mobility enhances the synchronization of epidemic evolution profiles for subpopulations in close geographical proximity.