Human mobility and pandemic preparedness

ABSTRACT
Mobility data are crucial to researchers and public health authorities to reconstruct the geographical spread of epidemics, forecast epidemic intensity and evaluate the impact of interventions once an outbreak developed.
The growing availability and use of these data in the last two decades allowed to build new models, gain new insights and sometimes provide guidance for outbreak response interventions during the COVID-19 pandemic. Unfortunately, on one side, this mostly happened in times of emergency thanks to “data for good” campaigns or pre-established partnerships between companies and research groups, which facilitated the availability of data for researchers. On the other, it mostly happened in the perspective of responding to the emergency and rarely to prepare for it. The COVID-19 pandemic showed us how unprepared we were on this side.
Here I will show how, integrating mobility data into epidemic models, we can enhance pandemic preparedness by building new surveillance tools, improving the spatial allocation of resources to anticipate outbreaks and reduce the risk of global disease diffusion.

BIO
After getting his Master’s Degree in Physics of Complex Systems at University of Turin in 2017, Mattia Mazzoli obtained the title of PhD in Physics of Complex Systems at IFISC (CSIC-UIB), Palma, in July 2021. During his PhD he studied the role played by human mobility on epidemics, urban structure and migrations. He works at the EPIcx lab, (IPLESP, INSERM-Sorbonne Université in Paris), as a postdoctoral researcher to study how mobility shapes the spatial spreading of viruses at national and continental scales. Especially he is interested in building pandemic preparedness and post-pandemic cities.