Determining travel fluxes in epidemic areas

PLoS Comput Biol. 2021 Oct 27;17(10):e1009473. doi: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1009473. eCollection 2021 Oct.

Abstract

Infectious diseases attack humans from time to time and threaten the lives and survival of people all around the world. An important strategy to prevent the spatial spread of infectious diseases is to restrict population travel. With the reduction of the epidemic situation, when and where travel restrictions can be lifted, and how to organize orderly movement patterns become critical and fall within the scope of this study. We define a novel diffusion distance derived from the estimated mobility network, based on which we provide a general model to describe the spatiotemporal spread of infectious diseases with a random diffusion process and a deterministic drift process of the population. We consequently develop a multi-source data fusion method to determine the population flow in epidemic areas. In this method, we first select available subregions in epidemic areas, and then provide solutions to initiate new travel flux among these subregions. To verify our model and method, we analyze the multi-source data from mainland China and obtain a new travel flux triggering scheme in the selected 29 cities with the most active population movements in mainland China. The testable predictions in these selected cities show that reopening the borders in accordance with our proposed travel flux will not cause a second outbreak of COVID-19 in these cities. The finding provides a methodology of re-triggering travel flux during the weakening spread stage of the epidemic.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • COVID-19 / epidemiology*
  • COVID-19 / prevention & control
  • COVID-19 / transmission
  • China / epidemiology
  • Cities
  • Computational Biology
  • Epidemics*
  • Humans
  • Mathematical Concepts
  • Models, Biological
  • SARS-CoV-2*
  • Spatio-Temporal Analysis
  • Travel* / statistics & numerical data

Grants and funding

YX was funded by National Natural Science Foundation of China (11631012) through Yanni Xiao (http://gr.xjtu.edu.cn/web/yxiao/10). The funder designed this research plan and prepared the manuscript. DC was partially funded by National Natural Science Foundation of China (11701442) through Xiaodan Sun (http://gr.xjtu.edu.cn/web/xiaodansun/english-version). The funder had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.