Laboratory

Migration and Mobility

At a Glance Projects Publications Team

Project

Impact of Human Mobility on Spatial Dynamics of Infectious Diseases

Daniela Perrotta, Egor Kotov; in Collaboration with John Palmer (Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona, Spain), Frederic Bartumeus (The Spanish National Research Council, Blanes Centre for Advanced Studies, Spain)

This project leverages various sources of human mobility at different scales, both from digital traces and mobile phone activities, in order to understand better their impact on modeling the spatial spread of infectious diseases.  Detailed Description

Human mobility and the Zika virus outbreak in Colombia

comparison between ZIKV incidence (per 100,000 population) as reported by official surveillance (black dots) and different networks © Perrotta, D., Frias-Martinez, E., Piontti, A. P. y, Zhang, Q., Luengo-Oroz, M., Paolotti, D., Tizzoni, M., & Vespignani, A. (2022). Comparing sources of mobility for modelling the epidemic spread of Zika virus in Colombia. PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases, 16(7), Article 7. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pntd.0010565

The graph shows the comparison between ZIKV incidence (per 100,000 population) as reported by official surveillance (black dots) and as estimated from the stochastic ensemble output for each mobility network considered, namely the CDR-informed network (blue), the census network (black), the gravity network (orange), the radiation network (purple) and the radiation network calibrated to CDR-informed mobility (green).

The inset graph shows the peak week calculated from the model estimates, compared to the observed peak in the week 2016-05 (green line). While the performance of the different mobility networks is comparatively similar at the national level, the figure shows the good performance of our model, including its epidemiological assumptions, in capturing the outbreak dynamics without any fit to the observed data. More details are available in the paper.

Publications

Perrotta, D.; Frias-Martinez, E.; Pastore y Piontti, A.; Zhang, Q.; Luengo-Oroz, M.; Paolotti, D.; Tizzoni, M.; Vespignani, A.:
PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases 16:7, e0010565–e0010565. (2022)    
Perrotta, D.; Frias-Martinez, E.; Pastore y Piontti, A.; Zhang, Q.; Luengo-Oroz, M.; Paolotti, D.; Tizzoni, M.; Vespignani, A.:
medRxiv preprints. unpublished. (2021)    
The Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) in Rostock is one of the leading demographic research centers in the world. It's part of the Max Planck Society, the internationally renowned German research society.