Effects of human dynamics on epidemic spreading in Côte d’Ivoire

Understanding and predicting outbreaks of contagious diseases are crucial to the development of society and public health, especially for underdeveloped countries. However, challenging problems are encountered because of complex epidemic spreading dynamics influenced by spatial structure and human dynamics (including both human mobility and human interaction intensity). We propose a systematical model to depict nationwide epidemic spreading in Côte d’Ivoire, which integrates multiple factors, such as human mobility, human interaction intensity, and demographic features. We provide insights to aid in modeling and predicting the epidemic spreading process by data-driven simulation and theoretical analysis, which is otherwise beyond the scope of local evaluation and geometrical views. We show that the requirement that the average local basic reproductive number to be greater than unity is not necessary for outbreaks of epidemics. The observed spreading phenomenon can be roughly explained as a heterogeneous diffusion–reaction process by redefining mobility distance according to the human mobility volume between nodes, which is beyond the geometrical viewpoint. However, the heterogeneity of human dynamics still poses challenges to precise prediction.