Epidemic spreading induced by diversity of agents' mobility

TL;DR

This paper investigates how diversity in individuals' public transport usage affects epidemic spread, revealing that increased mobility diversity lowers the epidemic threshold and can inform strategies to enhance societal resistance to infectious diseases.

Contribution

It introduces a model linking mobility diversity to epidemic thresholds, providing new insights into controlling disease spread without reducing public transport usage.

Findings

Higher mobility diversity reduces epidemic threshold.

Maintaining public mobility while increasing diversity enhances societal resistance.

Model results align with numerical simulations.

Abstract

In this paper, we study into the impact of the preference of an individual for public transport on the spread of infectious disease, through a quantity known as the public mobility. Our theoretical and numerical results based on a constructed model reveal that if the average public mobility of the agents is fixed, an increase in the diversity of the agents' public mobility reduces the epidemic threshold, beyond which an enhancement in the rate of infection is observed. Our findings provide an approach to improve the resistance of a society against infectious disease, while preserving the utilization rate of the public transportation system.