Title: Vulnerability to pandemics in a rapidly urbanizing society,
Abstract: We examine salient trends of influenza pandemics in Australia, a rapidly
urbanizing nation. To do so, we implement state-of-the-art influenza
transmission and progression models within a large-scale stochastic computer
simulation, generated using comprehensive Australian census datasets from 2006,
2011, and 2016. Our results offer the first simulation-based investigation of a
population's sensitivity to pandemics across multiple historical time points,
and highlight three significant trends in pandemic patterns over the years:
increased peak prevalence, faster spreading rates, and decreasing
spatiotemporal bimodality. We attribute these pandemic trends to increases in
two key quantities indicative of urbanization: population fraction residing in
major cities, and international air traffic. In addition, we identify features
of the pandemic's geographic spread that can only be attributed to changes in
the commuter mobility network. The generic nature of our model and the ubiquity
of urbanization trends around the world make it likely for our results to be
applicable in other rapidly urbanizing nations.