Evidence map›Paper›PMID 40858747›Full record

ArticleScientific reports2025

Assessing the impact of interregional mobility on COVID19 spread in Spain using transfer entropy.

Miguel Ponce-de-Leon, Camila Pontes, Alex Arenas, Alfonso Valencia

Abstract read
In one paragraph

Article in Scientific reports, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.

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0citing papers in PubMed
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1 · What the graph read from it

What it found

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2 · The registry

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3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

0 citing papers in PubMed.

No citing paper in PubMed yet.

4 · The record

Corrections and comments

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5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

4 authors.

Miguel Ponce-de-LeonBarcelona Supercomputing Center, Barcelona, Spain. miguel.ponce@bsc.es.
Camila PontesBarcelona Supercomputing Center, Barcelona, Spain.
Alex ArenasUniversitat Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona, Spain.
Alfonso ValenciaBarcelona Supercomputing Center, Barcelona, Spain.

Funding

Agencia Estatal de Investigación FJC2021-046655-IHorizon 2020 Framework Programme 101092749Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación PID2021-128005NB-C21Pacific Northwest National Laboratory DE-AC05-76RL01830
6 · The paper itself

Abstract

Human mobility played a key role in shaping the spatiotemporal dynamics of COVID19 transmission. This study employs Transfer Entropy (TE), an information-theoretic approach, to investigate the directional relationship between interregional mobility and COVID19 spread in Spain. Specifically, we use the mobility-associated risk time series, derived from phone-based origin-destination data and local infection prevalence, to estimate the flow of potentially infected individuals between regions. TE is then applied to measure the information flow from mobility-associated risk to regional case counts, enabling us to uncover spatio-temporal patterns of mobility-driven transmission. Using real-world data, we identified provinces that acted as outbreak drivers during the COVID19 pandemic in Spain and detected temporal shifts in the strength and direction of mobility's influence. Our findings align with key epidemiological events, such as the 2020 summer outbreak in Lleida linked to seasonal workers, and highlight the effects of non-pharmaceutical interventions, including bar closures in Catalunya, on transmission dynamics. Finally, we validated our approach using simulations from a metapopulation SIR model with known transmission pathways, showing that TE can recover mobility-induced transmission structure while reducing indirect or spurious associations. Altogether, our work provides a novel approach to study the effect of interregional mobility on epidemic spread and to uncover spatio-temporal patterns of mobility-driven transmission, offering valuable insights to inform the timing and regional targeting of non-pharmaceutical interventions.

Indexed as

COVID-19EntropyHumansPandemicsSARS-CoV-2SpainSpatio-Temporal AnalysisCausal inferenceEpidemicHuman mobilityTransfer entropy

Identifiers

PMID40858747
PMCPMC12381067

What OpenQuestion holds

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LicenceCC BY-NC-ND
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Registered trials

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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.