Impact of temporal scales and recurrent mobility patterns on the unfolding of epidemics

Human mobility plays a key role on the transformation of local disease outbreaks into global pandemics. Indeed, the inclusion of population movement into epidemic models has become mandatory for understanding current epidemic episodes as well as designing efficient prevention policies. Following this challenge, here we develop a Markovian framework that enables us to address the impact of recurrent mobility patterns on epidemic onset at different temporal scales. The formalism is validated by comparing its predictions with results from mechanistic simulations. The fair agreement between theory and numerical simulations, enables us to derive an analytical expression for the epidemic threshold, capturing the critical conditions triggering epidemic outbreaks. Finally, by performing an exhaustive analysis of this epidemic threshold, we reveal that the impact of tuning human mobility on the emergence of diseases is strongly affected by the temporal scales associated to both epidemiological and mobility processes. (statphys 27)