Effect of daily periodic human movement on dengue dynamics: The case of the 2010 outbreak in Hermosillo, Mexico

The human movement plays an important role in the spread of infectious diseases. On an urban scale, people move daily to workplaces, schools, among others. Here, we are interested in exploring the effect of the daily local stay on the variations of some characteristics of dengue dynamics such as the transmission rates and local basic reproductive numbers. For this, we use a two-patch mathematical model that explicitly considers that daily mobility of people and real data from the 2010 dengue outbreak in Hermosillo, Mexico. Based on a preliminary cluster analysis, we divide the city into two regions, the south and north sides, which determine each patch of the model. We use a Bayesian approach to estimate the transmission rates and local basic reproductive numbers of some urban mobility scenarios where residents of each patch spend daily the 100% (no human movement between patches), 75% and 50% of their day at their place of residence. For the north side, estimates of transmission rates do not vary and it is more likely that the local basic reproductive number to be greater than one for all three different scenarios. On the contrary, transmission rates of the south side have more weight in lower values when consider the human movement between patches compared to the uncoupled case. In fact, local basic reproductive numbers less than 1 are not negligible for the south side. If information about commuting is known, this work might be useful to obtain better estimates of some contagion local properties of a patch, such as the basic reproductive number. (c) 2021 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Automated summary

This study investigates the impact of daily local stay on the dynamics of dengue fever transmission in urban areas. Results show that transmission rates and local basic reproductive numbers in the north side are more likely to be greater than one, while the south side has a higher probability of lower transmission rates when considering human movement between patches.