ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2020
The duration of travel impacts the spatial dynamics of infectious diseases.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 22 papers.
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Who cites it
22 citing papers in PubMed, 39 citations in OpenAlex.
- How important is the spatial movement of people in attempts to eliminate the transmission of human helminth infections by mass drug administration?Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Trial
- Mobility data resolution needed to inform predictive models of spatial epidemic spread from mobile phone data.PLoS computational biology · 2026Article
- Human mobility and outbreak origins in epidemic spread: Insights from agent-based modeling.PLoS computational biology · 2026Article
- Viral emergence and pandemic preparedness in a One Health framework.Nature reviews. Microbiology · 2026Review
- Social, mobility and contact networks in shaping health behaviours and infectious disease dynamics: a scoping review.Infectious diseases of poverty · 2025Article
- Next-Generation Nucleic Acid-Based Diagnostics for Viral Pathogens: Lessons Learned from the SARS-CoV-2 Pandemic.Microorganisms · 2025Review
- EpiGeoPop: a tool for developing spatially accurate country-level epidemiological models.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Travel distance, frequency of return, and the spread of disease.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Disparities in mobile phone ownership reflect inequities in access to healthcare.PLOS digital health · 2023Article
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- QnAs with Lauren M. Gardner: Winner of the 2022 Lasker-Bloomberg Public Service Award.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Exploring the Relationship among Human Activities, COVID-19 Morbidity, and At-Risk Areas Using Location-Based Social Media Data: Knowledge about the Early Pandemic Stage in Wuhan.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2022Article
- A single-agent extension of the SIR model describes the impact of mobility restrictions on the COVID-19 epidemic.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Challenges in evaluating risks and policy options around endemic establishment or elimination of novel pathogens.Epidemics · 2021Article
- Mapping Total Exceedance PMGeoHealth · 2021Article
- Spatial distribution of COVID-19 cases, epidemic spread rate, spatial pattern, and its correlation with meteorological factors during the first to the second waves.Journal of infection and public health · 2021Article
- Trip duration drives shift in travel network structure with implications for the predictability of spatial disease spread.PLoS computational biology · 2021Article
- Detecting behavioural changes in human movement to inform the spatial scale of interventions against COVID-19.PLoS computational biology · 2021Article
- Spatial distribution characteristics of the COVID-19 pandemic in Beijing and its relationship with environmental factors.The Science of the total environment · 2021Article
- Universal scaling of human flow remain unchanged during the COVID-19 pandemic.Applied network science · 2021Article
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7 authors at 4 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Humans can impact the spatial transmission dynamics of infectious diseases by introducing pathogens into susceptible environments. The rate at which this occurs depends in part on human-mobility patterns. Increasingly, mobile-phone usage data are used to quantify human mobility and investigate the impact on disease dynamics. Although the number of trips between locations and the duration of those trips could both affect infectious-disease dynamics, there has been limited work to quantify and model the duration of travel in the context of disease transmission. Using mobility data inferred from mobile-phone calling records in Namibia, we calculated both the number of trips between districts and the duration of these trips from 2010 to 2014. We fit hierarchical Bayesian models to these data to describe both the mean trip number and duration. Results indicate that trip duration is positively related to trip distance, but negatively related to the destination population density. The highest volume of trips and shortest trip durations were among high-density districts, whereas trips among low-density districts had lower volume with longer duration. We also analyzed the impact of including trip duration in spatial-transmission models for a range of pathogens and introduction locations. We found that inclusion of trip duration generally delays the rate of introduction, regardless of pathogen, and that the variance and uncertainty around spatial spread increases proportionally with pathogen-generation time. These results enhance our understanding of disease-dispersal dynamics driven by human mobility, which has potential to elucidate optimal spatial and temporal scales for epidemic interventions.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.