The Spread of Airplane Borne Epidemics - a #Visualization

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Whenever there is an epidemic, there are three basic questions, viz.

  1. When is the epidemic going to arrive here (for wherever 'here' is)
  2. How fast is it moving?
  3. Where did it come from?

As Brockmann Labs puts it
We live in a globally connected world. More than 3 billion passengers travel each year on the worldwide air-transportation network and cover trillions of miles of travel. There is no scale to modern mobility. Our global connectivity has reshaped the way that spreading phenomena evolve on the networks that connect us. The complexity of modern mobility translates into a high degree of spatio-temporal complexity of spreading phenomena such as the spread of news, the dynamics of global diseases of human mediated bio-invasion. 
The image above shows the most probably path an epidemic will take if it originates in Mexico, and the video below shows the same for Atlanta.  The source paper is A geometric approach to network driven contagion phenomena, and is quite readable.  Also, this link has a bunch of other simulations - London, Chicago, and Mexico City...



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