Spatial epidemiology of networked metapopulation: An overview

Lin WANG; Xiang Li

In these cases, it is infeasible to analyze the invasion threshold through the theory of branching process, since the prerequisite of identical basic reproductive number in all subpopulations is invalid. Instead, the next generation matrix (NGM) approach [126] can be applied to analyze the global outbreak threshold R g 0 here. Due to the mixing of individuals with heterogeneous contact capacities in each subpopulation, which is analogous to the effect induced by annealed heterogeneous networks [45] , the addressed locationspecific contact patterns reduce the epidemic threshold significantly, and thus favor disease outbreaks in contrast to the traditional homogeneous cases. Figs. 4 c-d show the phase diagrams of the global R g 0 under these two types of contact patterns, respectively. Interestingly, the variance of disease prevalence under the destination-driven scenario has a monotonic dependence on the characteristic contact rates, whereas under the origin-driven scenario, counterintuitively, the increase of contact rates weakens the disease prevalence in some parametric ranges. This topic was also extended to study the metapopulation network, which unraveled a new problem of disease localization, i.e., the epidemic might be localized on a finite number of highly connected hubs. author/funder. All rights reserved. No reuse allowed without permission.