Evidence item

Modifying travel behavior is often critical for the public health response to infectious disease outbreaks, but depends on consistent, reliable detection. Often, this involves recommending that communities avoid high-risk areas, but if detection is low where transmission is high, these recommendations could lead to a counterproductive response if cases reported by health systems are mostly from low-risk areas. Mismatches between detection and transmission can be further exacerbated by behavioral associations between locations. ... We then use smartphone location data to show that there is a clear dichotomy in terms of travel behavior, where the number of trips to places typically associated with urban areas are strongly positively correlated through space and time, and are strongly negatively correlated with places associated with rural areas.