Spatial immunization to abate disease spreading in transportation hubs

Mattia Mazzoli1,2, Riccardo Gallotti3, Filippo Privitera4, Pere Colet1 and José J. Ramasco1

1Instituto de Física Interdisciplinar y Sistemas Complejos IFISC (CSIC-UIB), Palma de Mallorca, Spain.
2INSERM, Sorbonne Université, Institut Pierre Louis d'Epidémiologie et de Santé Publique, IPLESP, Paris, France.
3 CHuB Lab, Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Via Sommarive 18, 38123 Povo (TN), Trento, Italy.
4Cuebiq Inc., 45 W 27th Street, 3rd floor, 10001 New York, NY, USA.

(March 2023)

Proximity social interactions are crucial for infectious diseases transmission. Crowded agglomerations pose serious risk of triggering superspreading events. Locations like transportation hubs (airports and stations) are designed to optimize logistic efficiency, not to reduce crowding, and are characterized by a constant in and out flow of people. Here, we analyze the paradigmatic example of London Heathrow, one of the busiest European airports. Thanks to a dataset of anonymized individuals' trajectories, we can model the spreading of different diseases to localize the contagion hotspots and to propose a spatial immunization policy targeting them to reduce disease spreading risk. We also detect the most vulnerable destinations to contagions produced at the airport and quantify the benefits of the spatial immunization technique to prevent regional and global disease diffusion. This method is immediately generalizable to train, metro and bus stations and to other facilities such as commercial or convention centers.

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