A microscopic approach to study the onset of a highly infectious disease spreading

Abstract

We combine a pedestrian dynamics model with a contact tracking method to simulate the initial spreading of a highly infectious airborne disease in a confined environment. We focus on a medium size population (up to 1000 people) with a small number of infectious people (1 or 2) and the rest of the people are divided between immune and susceptible. We adopt a space-continuous model that represents pedestrian dynamics by the forces acting on them, i.e. a microscopic force-based model. Once discretized, the model results in a high-dimensional system of second order ordinary differential equations. Before adding the contact tracking to the pedestrian dynamics model, we calibrate the model parameters, compare the model results against empirical data, and show that pedestrian self-organization into lanes can be captured. We consider an explicit approach for contact tracking by introducing a sickness domain around a sick person. A healthy but susceptible person who remains in the sickness domain for a certain amount of time may get infected (with a prescribed probability) and become a so-called secondary contact. As a concrete setting to simulate the onset of disease spreading, we consider terminals in two US airports: Hobby Airport in Houston and the Atlanta International Airport. We consider different scenarios and we quantify the increase in average number of secondary contacts as a given terminal becomes more densely populated, the percentage of immune people decreases, the number of primary contacts increases, and areas of high density (such as the boarding buses) are present.

Keywords: Complex systems; Contact tracking; Crowd dynamics; Disease spreading.