EPIDEMIC EVENT HORIZON
SPREADING PATTERNS OF PANDEMICS IN A GLOBALISED WORLD, 2013-2017
DIRK BROCKMANN (DE)
Today, global mobility takes place on a complex network of more than 25,000 connections between more than 4,000 airports worldwide. More than three billion passengers travel each year on the global air transportation network, travelling more than fifteen billion kilometres in total every day — three times the radius of our solar system.
Because of this global connectivity, emergent epidemics, like the 2009 flu pandemic, spread in a complex and seemingly unpredictable way. This is because we still think in terms of traditional geographic distances.
If we look at spreading patterns from the perspective of a virus, we can replace geographic distance with a more suitable notion of distance: if many passengers travel between two locations, they are effectively closer, and when few people travel between two airports, they are further apart.
Given a particular outbreak location — for instance, an airport in West Africa during the Ebola crisis — we can use this new notion of effective distance in combination with computer simulations to compute the most likely pathways to other locations in the world via air traffic, and illustrate how close a given airport is to the outbreak location. The interactive tool can be used to select potential outbreak locations and identify, on the fly, how a virus will travel.
BIO
Dirk Brockmann studied theoretical physics and mathematics and is a professor in the Department of Theoretical Biology at Humboldt University of Berlin and the Robert Koch Institute, Germany’s federal institute for public health. He studies complex systems in biology, physics, social sciences and epidemiology. He has pioneered the studies of human mobility using proxy data and has discovered universal scaling laws in human mobility based on the analysis of geographic movement patterns of dollar bills collected at the online bill-tracking website wheresgeorge.com.