Location based surveillance for early detection of contagious outbreaks

Abstract

In previous studies, non-distance-dependent surveillance strategies have improved the performance of contagious outbreaks detection. In this paper, we propose a new distance-dependent strategy that does not require ascertainment of global or local network structure, namely, simply monitoring the relative significance difference of randomly selected individuals in school and workplace. To evaluate whether such two group could indeed provide early detection, we studied a flu outbreak in contact network simulation experiments. Our experimental results show that this method could provide significant additional time to react to epidemics, especially when the infection rate is not large.