Papers › Epidemiological dynamics in populations structured by neighbourhoods and households
Epidemiological dynamics in populations structured by neighbourhoods and households
Abby Barlow, Ben Adams, Sarah Penington
Epidemiological dynamics are affected by the spatial and demographic structure of the host population. Households and neighbourhoods are known to be important groupings but little is known about the epidemiological interplay between them. In order to explore the implications for infectious disease epidemiology of households with similar demographic structures clustered in space we develop a multi-scale epidemic model consisting of neighbourhoods of households. In our analysis we focus on key parameters which control household size, the importance of transmission within households relative to outside of them, and the degree to which the non-household transmission is localised within neighbourhoods. We construct the household reproduction number R_* over all neighbourhoods and derive the analytic probability of an outbreak occurring from a single infected individual in a specific neighbourhood. We find that reduced localisation of transmission within neighbourhoods reduces R_* when household size differs between neighbourhoods. This effect is amplified by larger differences between household sizes and larger divergence between transmission rates within households and outside of them. However, the impact of neighbourhoods with larger household sizes on an individual's risk of infection is mainly limited to the individuals that reside in those neighbourhoods. We consider various surveillance scenarios and show that household size information from the initial infectious cases is often more important than neighbourhood information while household size and neighbourhood localisation influences the sequence of neighbourhoods in which an outbreak is observed.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Methods
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections