Incorporating human mobility to enhance epidemic response and estimate real-time reproduction numbers.

ABSTRACT: Human mobility plays a critical role in the transmission dynamics of infectious diseases, influencing both their spread and the effectiveness of control measures. In the process of quantifying the real-time situation of an epidemic, the instantaneous reproduction number Rt appears to be one of the useful metrics widely used by public health researchers, officials, and policy makers. Since individuals can contract infections both within their region of origin and in other regions they visit, ignoring human mobility in the estimation process overlooks its impact on transmission dynamics and can lead to biased estimates of Rt, potentially misrepresenting the true epidemic situation. Our study explicitly integrates human mobility into a renewal-equation based disease transmission model to capt

SUBMITTER: Roy M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12614531 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature