Title: Detecting the impact of public transit on the transmission of epidemics,
Abstract: In many developing countries, public transit plays an important role in daily
life. However, few existing methods have considered the influence of public
transit in their models. In this work, we present a dual-perspective view of
the epidemic spreading process of the individual that involves both
contamination in places (such as work places and homes) and public transit
(such as buses and trains). In more detail, we consider a group of individuals
who travel to some places using public transit, and introduce public transit
into the epidemic spreading process. A novel modeling framework is proposed
considering place-based infections and the public-transit-based infections. In
the urban scenario, we investigate the public transit trip contribution rate
(PTTCR) in the epidemic spreading process of the individual, and assess the
impact of the public transit trip contribution rate by evaluating the volume of
infectious people. Scenarios for strategies such as public transit and school
closure were tested and analyzed. Our simulation results suggest that
individuals with a high public transit trip contribution rate will increase the
volume of infectious people when an infectious disease outbreak occurs by
affecting the social network through the public transit trip contribution rate.