Simple visit behavior unifies complex Zika outbreaks

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that incorporating everyday human visit-revisit behavior into models can accurately reproduce Zika outbreak patterns and provide actionable insights for outbreak mitigation.

Contribution

It introduces a simple visit behavior model that unifies complex Zika outbreak dynamics and offers a quantitative explanation for human case distributions.

Findings

Visit-revisit behavior explains outbreak timing and spread.

Model accurately reproduces Miami 2016 Zika data.

Predictions inform targeted outbreak mitigation strategies.

Abstract

We analyze the paper of Nathan D. Grubaugh et al. (Nature 546, 401-405, 2017) and find that it does not offer a convincing quantitative explanation for what generated the temporal distribution of human Zika virus (ZIKV) cases shown in their paper (Fig. 1d). We criticize this aspect because it is this understanding of how human cases develop from day-today and week-to-week within an area such as these Ground Zeros, that policymakers need in order to mitigate future outbreaks. We present results that strongly suggest that the missing piece is everyday human visit-revisit behavior. These results reproduce the human outbreak data in the key areas of Miami in 2016 very well, and give policymakers specific predictions for how changes in human flow through these areas will affect, and hence can be used to mitigate, future ZIka outbreaks in Miami and beyond.