Article ID Journal Published Year Pages File Type
10481927 Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications 2013 10 Pages PDF
Abstract
In this paper, explicitly considering the influences of an epidemic outbreak on human travel, a time-varying human mobility pattern is introduced to model the time variation of global human travel. The impacts of the pattern on epidemic dynamics in heterogeneous metapopulation networks, wherein each node represents a subpopulation with any number of individuals, are investigated by using a mean-field approach. The results show that the pattern does not alter the epidemic threshold, but can slightly lower the final average density of infected individuals as a whole. More importantly, we also find that the pattern produces different impacts on nodes with different degree, and that there exists a critical degree kc. For nodes with degree smaller than kc, the pattern produces a positive impact on epidemic mitigation; conversely, for nodes with degree larger than kc, the pattern produces a negative impact on epidemic mitigation.
Related Topics
Physical Sciences and Engineering Mathematics Mathematical Physics
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