The impact of human location-specific contact pattern on the sir epidemic transmission between populations

The structured-population model is extensively used to study the complexity of epidemic dynamics. In many seminal researches, the impact of human mobility on the outbreak threshold has been profoundly studied, with the general assumption that the human contact pattern is mixing homogeneously. As the individual contact is assumed uniform among different subpopulations, the basic reproductive number, R₀, which relates to the stability at the disease-free equilibrium, is equal to the same constant on separate locations. However, recent studies have shown that there may exist location-related factors driving the variance of disease incidence between populations, in reality. Therefore, in this study, the location-specific heterogeneous contact pattern has been introduced into a famous phenomenological structured-population model, where bidirectional recurrent commuting flows couple two typical subpopulations, to study the complex dynamics behaviors of spatial transmission of epidemics. Besides the usual SIR epidemic dynamics with birth and death processes, we take into account the contact process by assigning each member from a given subpopulation with a characteristic contact rate. Through theoretical arguments and agent-based computer simulations, we unveil that the stressed element dramatically affects the epidemic threshold of the system.