From localized to well-mixed: How commuter interactions shape disease spread

Abstract: Interactions between commuting individuals can lead to large-scale spreading of rumors, ideas, or disease, even though the commuters have no net displacement. The emergent dynamics depend crucially on the commuting distribution of a population, that is how the probability to travel to a destination decays with distance from home. Applying this idea to epidemics, we will demonstrate the qualitatively different infection dynamics emerging from populations with different commuting distributions. If the commuting distribution is exponentially localized, we recover a reaction-diffusion system and observe Fisher waves traveling at a speed proportional to the characteristic commuting distance. If the commuting distribution has a long tail, then no finite-velocity waves can form, but we show that, in some regimes, there is nontrivial spatial dependence that the well-mixed approximation neglects. We discuss how, in all cases, an initial dispersal-dominated regime can allow the disease to go undetected for a finite amount of time before exponential growth takes over. This "offset time" is a quantity of huge importance for epidemic surveillance and yet largely ignored in the literature.