An infectious diseases hazard map for India based on mobility and transportation networks

TL;DR

This paper develops a hazard map for infectious diseases in India using mobility data and an effective distance measure, improving prediction of outbreak spread across cities.

Contribution

It introduces a novel hazard index based on mobility networks and demonstrates its effectiveness with an SIR model and real outbreak data.

Findings

Effective distance predicts infection arrival times accurately.

Hazard index correlates well with observed SARS-CoV-2 spread.

Map can be adapted for other infectious disease outbreaks.

Abstract

We propose a risk measure and construct an infectious diseases hazard map for India. Given an outbreak location, a hazard index is assigned to each city using an effective distance that depends on inter-city mobilities instead of geographical distance. We demonstrate its utility using an SIR model augmented with air, rail, and road data between top 446 cities. Simulations show that the effective distance from outbreak location reliably predicts the time of arrival of infection in other cities. The hazard index predictions compare well with the observed spread of SARS-CoV-2. The hazard map can be useful in other outbreaks also.