Detecting the impact of public transit on the transmission of epidemics

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new model for epidemic spread that incorporates public transit, showing that high transit usage increases infection volume and highlighting the importance of transit-related interventions.

Contribution

It presents a dual-perspective epidemic model including public transit, a novel approach for understanding disease transmission in urban environments.

Findings

High public transit trip contribution rate correlates with increased infection volume.

Public transit and school closures can mitigate epidemic spread.

Transit-based interventions are crucial in controlling urban epidemics.

Abstract

In many developing countries, public transit plays an important role in daily life. However, few existing methods have considered the influence of public transit in their models. In this work, we present a dual-perspective view of the epidemic spreading process of the individual that involves both contamination in places (such as work places and homes) and public transit (such as buses and trains). In more detail, we consider a group of individuals who travel to some places using public transit, and introduce public transit into the epidemic spreading process. A novel modeling framework is proposed considering place-based infections and the public-transit-based infections. In the urban scenario, we investigate the public transit trip contribution rate (PTTCR) in the epidemic spreading process of the individual, and assess the impact of the public transit trip contribution rate by evaluating the volume of infectious people. Scenarios for strategies such as public transit and school closure were tested and analyzed. Our simulation results suggest that individuals with a high public transit trip contribution rate will increase the volume of infectious people when an infectious disease outbreak occurs by affecting the social network through the public transit trip contribution rate.