Travel distance, frequency of return and the spread of disease

Abstract

In 2020 and 2021, the spread of COVID-19 was globally addressed by imposing restrictions on the distance of individual travel. Recent literature has uncovered a clear pattern in human mobility that underlies the complexity of urban mobility: $r\cdot f$, the product of distance traveled $r$ and frequency of return $f$ per user to a given location, is invariant across space. This paper asks whether the invariant $r\cdot f$ also serves as a driver for epidemic spread, so that the risk associated with human movement can be modeled by a unifying variable $r\cdot f$. We use two large-scale datasets of individual human mobility to show that there is in fact a simple relation between $r$ and $f$ and both speed and spatial dispersion of disease spread. This discovery could assist in modeling spread of disease and inform travel policies in future epidemics -- based not only on travel distance $r$ but also on frequency of return $f$.

9 pages, 4 figures