Pooling Mobility Obscures Epidemic Invasion Routes

Abstract

Epidemic models often pool air travel, commuting, and other mobility layers into a single weighted network. Pooling keeps the total imported infections into a region but discards the transport mode and route that delivered them, the information a mode-specific intervention needs. We make this precise for directed multilayer flows with heavy-tailed variation. Pooling acts as an asymmetric filter. The magnitude of an extreme importation, its radial tail index, is an exact invariant of sampling and nonnegative aggregation, whereas its composition across layers and routes, the angular part, is reweighted by layer-specific sampling and can be irrecoverably merged. We give a necessary and sufficient condition for recovering route composition, attach a surveillance decision cost to the loss, and show that the first established route need not be the busiest. A controlled metapopulation study calibrates the cost, and two contrasting reconstructions show where it bites. In US pandemic influenza, air adds fitted information beyond commuting, and a layer-resolved ranking targets more air-import burden than a pooled one. In the early Italian COVID-19 wave, commuting improves onset reconstruction while air attribution stays unresolved. Pooling can therefore support total-importation surveillance but cannot in general identify the mode or route behind an importation.