Balancing Mobility Behaviors to avoid Global epidemics from Local Outbreaks

TL;DR

This paper introduces a unified model of human mobility that smoothly transitions between commuting and exploratory behaviors, revealing complex effects on epidemic thresholds and implications for containment strategies.

Contribution

It presents a formalism unifying different mobility behaviors and derives an analytical epidemic threshold, highlighting non-monotonic effects of recurrence on disease spread.

Findings

Recurrence lowers epidemic threshold in high-contact hubs.

Recurrence raises invasion threshold in low-mobility scenarios.

Allowing recurrence can suppress global epidemics while fostering local outbreaks.

Abstract

Human interactions and mobility shape epidemic dynamics by facilitating disease outbreaks and their spatial spread across regions. Traditional models often isolate commuting and random mobility as separate behaviors, focusing either on short, recurrent trips or on random, exploratory movements. Here, we propose a unified formalism that allows a smooth transition between commuting and exploratory behavior based on travel and return probabilities. We derive an analytical expression for the epidemic threshold, revealing a non-monotonic dependence on recurrence rates: while recurrence tends to lower the threshold by increasing agent concentration in high-contact hubs, it counterintuitively raises the invasion threshold in low-mobility scenarios, suggesting that allowing recurrence may foster local outbreaks while suppressing global epidemics. These results provide a comprehensive understanding of the interplay between human mobility patterns and epidemic spread, with implications for containment strategies in structured populations.