Understanding components of mobility during the COVID-19 pandemic

Publikation: Bidrag til tidsskriftTidsskriftartikelForskningfagfællebedømt

Dokumenter

  • Full Text

    Forlagets udgivne version, 850 KB, PDF-dokument

Travel restrictions have proven to be an effective strategy to control the spread of the COVID-19 epidemics, in part because they help delay disease propagation across territories. The question, however, as to how different types of travel behaviour, from commuting to holiday-related travel, contribute to the spread of infectious diseases remains open. Here, we address this issue by using factorization techniques to decompose the temporal network describing mobility flows throughout 2020 into interpretable components. Our results are based on two mobility datasets: the first is gathered from Danish mobile network operators; the second originates from the Facebook Data-For-Good project. We find that mobility patterns can be described as the aggregation of three mobility network components roughly corresponding to travel during workdays, weekends and holidays, respectively. We show that, across datasets, in periods of strict travel restrictions the component corresponding to workday travel decreases dramatically. Instead, the weekend component, increases. Finally, we study how each type of mobility (workday, weekend and holiday) contributes to epidemics spreading, by measuring how the effective distance, which quantifies how quickly a disease can travel between any two municipalities, changes across network components.
OriginalsprogEngelsk
Artikelnummer20210118
TidsskriftPhilosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences
Vol/bind380
Udgave nummer2214
ISSN1364-503X
DOI
StatusUdgivet - 2022

Bibliografisk note

Funding Information:
The authors are thankful for support from the HOPE project funded by the Carlsberg Foundation. Acknowledgements

Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 The Authors.

    Forskningsområder

  • human mobility, CoVID-19, non-negative matrix factorization

ID: 346592100