Impact of origin-destination information in epidemic spreading

The networked structure of contacts shapes the spreading of epidemic processes. Recent advances on network theory have improved our understanding of the epidemic processes at large scale. The relevance of several considerations still needs to be evaluated in the study of epidemic spreading. One of them is that of accounting for the influence of origin and destination patterns in the flow of the carriers of an epidemic. Here we compute origin-destination patterns compatible with empirical data of coarse grained flows in the air transportation network. We study the incidence of epidemic processes in a metapopulation approach considering different alternatives to the flows prior knowledge. The data-driven scenario where the estimation of origin and destination flows is considered turns out to be relevant to assess the impact of the epidemics at a microscopic level (in our scenario, which populations are infected). However, this information is irrelevant to assess its macroscopic incidence (fraction of infected populations). These results are of interest to implement even better computational platforms to forecast epidemic incidence.his work has been partially supported by MINECO through grant FIS2015-71582-C2-1 (A.A. and S.G.), Generalitat de Catalunya project 2017-SGR-896 (A.A. and S.G.), and Universitat Rovira i Virgili projects 2017PFR-URV-B2-41 (A.A. and S.G.) and 2017PFR-URV-B2-29 (A.F.). S.M. acknowledges support from the Spanish State Research Agency, through the María de Maeztu Program for Units of Excellence in R&D (MDM-2017-0711 to the IFISC Institute). A.A. acknowledges financial support from ICREA Academia and the James S. McDonnell Foundation.Peer reviewe