The effect of demographic and spatial variability on epidemics: A comparison between Beijing, Delhi, and Los Angeles

A social network is a critical infrastructure for the propagation of an infectious disease in a population. It is important to study the structural properties of the social network for identifying feasible public health interventions that can effectively contain a potential epidemic outbreak. In this work, we focus on flu-like diseases and corresponding people-people social contact networks. We study such social infrastructures of three cities: Los Angeles, USA, Beijing, China and Delhi, India. These contact networks are different due to different construction methodologies and the fact that the populations inherently have very different demographic structures and activity patterns. We compare them in terms of static structural properties (such as clustering coefficient, degree distribution), as well as disease dynamics and efficacy of intervention (e.g., school closure). The comparison between synthetic populations and social contact networks from different regions of the world can provide valuable insight on creating a global synthetic population and social infrastructure for studying public health problems.