Critical regimes driven by recurrent mobility patterns of reaction–diffusion processes in networks
2017
Reaction–diffusion processes
1
have been widely used to study dynamical processes in epidemics
2–4
and ecology
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in networked metapopulations. In the context of epidemics
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, reaction processes are understood as contagions within each subpopulation (patch), while diffusion represents the mobility of individuals between patches. Recently, the characteristics of human mobility
7
, such as its recurrent nature, have been proven crucial to understand the phase transition to endemic epidemic states
8,9
. Here, by developing a framework able to cope with the elementary epidemic processes, the spatial distribution of populations and the commuting mobility patterns, we discover three different critical regimes of the epidemic incidence as a function of these parameters. Interestingly, we reveal a regime of the reaction–diffussion process in which, counter-intuitively, mobility is detrimental to the spread of disease. We analytically determine the precise conditions for the emergence of any of the three possible critical regimes in real and synthetic networks.
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