A human behavior integrated hierarchical model of airborne disease transmission in a large city

Abstract

A B S T R A C TEpidemics of infectious diseases such as SARS, H1N1, and MERS threaten public health, particularly in large cities such as Hong Kong. We constructed a human behavior integrated hierarchical (HiHi) model based on the SIR (Susceptible, Infectious, and Recovered) model, the Wells-Riley equation, and population movement considering both spatial and temporal dimensions. The model considers more than 7 million people, 3 million indoor environments, and 2566 public transport routes in Hong Kong. Smallpox, which could be spread through airborne routes, is studied as an example. The simulation is based on people's daily commutes and indoor human behaviors, which were summarized by mathematical patterns. We found that 59.6%, 18.1%, and 13.4% of patients become infected in their homes, offices, and schools, respectively. If both work stoppage and school closure measures are taken when the number of infected people is greater than 1000, an infectious disease will be effectively controlled after 2 months. The peak number of infected people will be reduced by 25% compared to taking no action, and the time of peak infections will be delayed by about 40 days if 90% of the infected people go to hospital during the infectious period. When ventilation rates in indoor environments increase to five times their default settings, smallpox will be naturally controlled. Residents of Kowloon and the north part of Hong Kong Island have a high risk of infection from airborne infectious diseases. Our HiHi model reduces the calculation time for infection rates to an acceptable level while preserving accuracy.

Increased infection severity in downstream cities in infectious disease transmission and tourists surveillance analysis

“…Individuals can either wear a mask or get vaccinated to reduce infection risk. Governments can limit the travel rate between cities and the probability of person-to-person contact via work stoppage ( Zhang et al, 2018a ) and school closure ( Gemmetto et al, 2014 ) to reduce infection risk. Comparing the two government strategies, controlling the amount of person-to-person contact per day is obviously effective in infectious disease control.…”

“…Many computer simulations have been conducted on infection spread within indoor environments, such as planes ( Namilae et al, 2017 ) and cruise ships ( Zhang et al, 2016a ); within buildings, such as offices ( Zhang et al, 2018b;Zhang and Li, 2018 ), hospitals ( Lau et al, 2004 ) and schools ( Zhang et al, 2011 ); and within cities ( Zhang et al, 2016b( Zhang et al, , 2018a. Research on infection spread across cities and countries has mainly focused on human mobility based on historical data processing ( Opatowski et al, 2011 ) and mathematical models ( Charu et al, 2017 ).…”

An Urban Road-Traffic Commuting Dynamics Study Based on Hotspot Clustering and a New Proposed Urban Commuting Electrostatics Model

“…There are a large number of spatial migration patterns for people in cities. For example, the patterns of home-work-home, home-education-home, and home-driving children to school-work-picking up children from school-home pattern are especially common [37]. No matter what the spatial migration patterns are, people's trajectories can be considered to be an O-D line or can be cut into several O-D lines.…”

Impact of Indirect Contacts in Emerging Infectious Disease on Social Networks

“…In the literature, previous works have aimed to characterize diffusion dynamics based on the interaction mechanisms among individuals [1,7,8]. These works have studied various aspects of human contact patterns from microscopic properties such as temporal behavior of contacts, burstiness, inter-event time and repetitiveness to the higher level structures such as clustering and community formation among individuals.…”