Impact of temporal scales and recurrent mobility patterns on the unfolding of epidemics

Abstract

Human mobility plays a key role on the transformation of local disease outbreaks into global pandemics. Thus, the inclusion of human movements into epidemic models has become mandatory for understanding current epidemic episodes and to design efficient prevention policies. Following this challenge, here we develop a Markovian framework which enables to address the impact of recurrent mobility patterns on the epidemic onset at different temporal scales. This formalism is validated by comparing their predictions with results from mechanistic simulations. The fair agreement between both theory and simulations enables to get an analytical expression for the epidemic threshold which captures the critical conditions triggering epidemic outbreaks. Finally, by performing an exhaustive analysis of this epidemic threshold, we reveal that the impact of tuning human mobility on the emergence of diseases is strongly affected by the temporal scales associated to both epidemiological and mobility processes.