Hand-hygiene mitigation strategies against global disease spreading through the air transportation network

Christos Nicolaides; Demetris Avraam; Luis Cueto-Felgueroso; Marta C. González; Ruben Juanes

We implement the epidemic model within the mobility model using Monte-Carlo simulations to track the mobility and contagion dynamics through the air transportation network. In the simulations, we consider different hand-hygiene mitigation strategies and we study their effects on the propagation and the diffusion of a disease at the global scale. We first study the conventional SIR epidemic model to identify the spatio-temporal structure of the disease for different seeding scenarios and to identify the most influential spreaders within the air transportation network. Furthermore, we study four hand-hygiene scenarios and their effectiveness to disease spreading inhibition: a. homogeneous increase of hand washing engagement at all airports, b. increased hand washing engagement at the ten most influential airports in the network, c. increased hand washing engagement at the ten most influential airports for each source of the disease, and d. increased hand washing engagement only at the source of the disease.