Human mobility and outbreak origins in epidemic spread: Insights from agent-based modeling.

Abstract

Human mobility is a key driver of early epidemic spread, and restricting travel remains one of the principal non-pharmaceutical interventions. To better understand how infections propagate through real-world mobility networks, it is essential to disaggregate their components and characterize the functional relationships between mobility flows and epidemic metrics. Here we introduce transCovasim, an agent-based extension of Covasim that explicitly couples parallel city simulations via inter-city traveler exchange while preserving the initial social network structure within each population, enabling controlled experiments on mobility and disease dynamics. Using transCovasim, we analyze a two-city system with equal or unequal populations and a hub-and-satellite commuting network parameterized to a Moscow-like setting. In paired identical cities, the mean lag between epidemic peaks scales approximately linearly with the logarithm of inter-city traffic, with steeper delays at lower transmissibility; epidemic variability declines as flows increase. With unequal city sizes, mobility primarily redistributes infections between cities; first-order Sobol' indices show that peak magnitude is largely insensitive to city's flows of different directions when sizes are comparable, while sensitivity for a smaller city shifts toward flow from a bigger city as the asymmetry increases. In the hub-and-satellite network, reducing commuting flows before the peak significantly lowers peak incidence, and cumulative infections can still be reduced when restrictions are introduced after the peak; early 100-fold cuts outperform 10-fold cuts, but produce similar results when introduced into the late exponential phase. Finally, dynamic time warping applied to surveillance curves identifies the outbreak's origin: under Moscow-like flows, accuracy reaches 78% by day 50 with 10% daily testing, and approaches 100% at lower connectivity. These results clarify how specific mobility patterns shape epidemic timing and burden and provide actionable guidance for mobility-targeted non-pharmaceutical interventions and early source attribution.