EpiRisk

Welcome to EpiRisk

EpiRisk is a computational platform designed to allow a quick estimate of the probability of exporting infected individuals from sites affected by a disease outbreak to other areas in the world through the airline transportation network and the daily commuting patterns. It also lets the user to explore the effects of potential restrictions applied to airline traffic and commuting flows.

Based on the number of infected individuals detected in one or more areas of the world, the platforms estimates two main quantities.

· Exported cases: the tool computes the probability P(n) of exporting a given number of cases n from the origin of the disease outbreak. In order to calculate the distribution P, the average time from exposure to symptoms onset and inability of traveling of infected individuals must be provided.

· Relative importation risk: for each location Y the platform evaluates the probability P(Y) that a single infected individual is traveling from the index areas to that specific destination Y. In other words, given the occurrence of one exported case, P(Y) is the probability that the disease carrier will appear in location Y, with respect to any other possible location.

By interacting with the map, the user can inspect the relative risk and the probability distribution of imported cases for single locations. In addition, the computed results are downloadable in commonly used data formats and as a high-resolution image of the risk map.

The airline transportation data used in the platform are based on origin-destination traffic flows from the OAG database that are aggregated at specific time and spatial scales by the GLEAM project. Commuting flows are derived by the analysis and modeling of data for more than 5,000,000 commuting patterns among 78,000 administrative regions in five continents. A manuscript detailing the algorithms devised to compute the estimates provided by the platform is under preparation.

Epirisk is a not-for profit platform: the results generated by the tool can be shared in compliance to the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.