The Impact of Mobility on the Spread of Infectious Diseases to and from High Risk Environments

Abstract

Transportation flows play a critical role in the propagation of infectious diseases. Mitigating the spread of such diseases requires understanding this dependency and building epidemiological models that explicitly account for transportation flows. In epidemiological studies, compartmental models such as the susceptible, exposed, infectious, and recovered (SEIR) model are an important tool in understanding how infectious diseases propagate through a population. Due to the importance of travel on the dynamics of the disease spread, there has been renewed interest in directly modeling transportation flows through the use of spatial meta-population SEIR models. This project explored models for explicitly integrating transportation flows in SEIR models with a focus on high-risk environments.