Disease spreading in populations of moving agents

Abstract

We study the effect of motion on disease spreading in a system of random walkers which additionally perform long-distance jumps. A small percentage of jumps in the agent motion is sufficient to destroy the local correlations and to produce a large drop in the epidemic threshold, well explained in terms of a mean-field approximation. This effect is similar to the crossover found in static small-world networks, and can be furthermore linked to the structural properties of the dynamical network of agent interactions.