The Role of Subway Travel in an Influenza Epidemic: A New York City Simulation

The interactions of people using public transportation in large metropolitan areas may help spread an influenza epidemic. An agent-based model computer simulation of New York City’s (NYC’s) five boroughs was developed that incorporated subway ridership into a Susceptible–Exposed–Infected–Recovered disease model framework. The model contains a total of 7,847,465 virtual people. Each person resides in one of the five boroughs of NYC and has a set of socio-demographic characteristics and daily behaviors that include age, sex, employment status, income, occupation, and household location and membership. The model simulates the interactions of subway riders with their workplaces, schools, households, and community activities. It was calibrated using historical data from the 1957–1958 influenza pandemics and from NYC travel surveys. The surveys were necessary to enable inclusion of subway riders into the model. The model results estimate that if influenza did occur in NYC with the characteristics of the 1957–1958 pandemic, 4% of transmissions would occur on the subway. This suggests that interventions targeted at subway riders would be relatively ineffective in containing the epidemic. A number of hypothetical examples demonstrate this feature. This information could prove useful to public health officials planning responses to epidemics.

[1]  Henry K. Oliver.  Spontaneous Expulsion of a Fibrous Polypus — Death from Peritonitis , 1859 .

[2]  John A. Nelder,et al.  A Simplex Method for Function Minimization , 1965, Comput. J..

[3]  M. D. McKay,et al.  Creating synthetic baseline populations , 1996 .

[4]  Aravind Srinivasan,et al.  Modelling disease outbreaks in realistic urban social networks , 2004, Nature.

[5]  A. Nizam,et al.  Containing Pandemic Influenza at the Source , 2005, Science.

[6]  Michael B Rothberg,et al.  Vaccination versus treatment of influenza in working adults: a cost-effectiveness analysis. , 2005, The American journal of medicine.

[7]  D. Cummings,et al.  Strategies for containing an emerging influenza pandemic in Southeast Asia , 2005, Nature.

[8]  C. Macken,et al.  Mitigation strategies for pandemic influenza in the United States. , 2006, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[9]  D. Cummings,et al.  Strategies for mitigating an influenza pandemic , 2006, Nature.

[10]  New York Household Travel Patterns: A Comparison Analysis , 2007 .

[11]  A. Flahault,et al.  Estimating the impact of school closure on influenza transmission from Sentinel data , 2008, Nature.

[12]  C. Macken,et al.  Modeling targeted layered containment of an influenza pandemic in the United States , 2008, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[13]  Laxminarayana Ganapathi,et al.  Synthesized Population Databases: A US Geospatial Database for Agent-Based Models. , 2009, Methods report.

[14]  R. Rabadán,et al.  Geographic dependence, surveillance, and origins of the 2009 influenza A (H1N1) virus. , 2009, The New England journal of medicine.

[15]  Kenneth J. Smith,et al.  The timing of influenza vaccination for older adults (65 years and older). , 2009, Vaccine.

[16]  Bruce Y. Lee,et al.  Economic value of seasonal and pandemic influenza vaccination during pregnancy. , 2009, Clinical infectious diseases : an official publication of the Infectious Diseases Society of America.

[17]  Hong Sun,et al.  Serum cross-reactive antibody response to a novel influenza A (H1N1) virus after vaccination with seasonal influenza vaccine. , 2009 .

[18]  Mass commuting and influenza vaccination prevalence in new york city: protection in a mixing environment. , 2010, Epidemics.

[19]  N. Andrews,et al.  Incidence of 2009 pandemic influenza A H1N1 infection in England: a cross-sectional serological study , 2010, The Lancet.

[20]  Shawn T. Brown,et al.  Simulating school closure strategies to mitigate an influenza epidemic. , 2010, Journal of public health management and practice : JPHMP.

[21]  D. Wagener,et al.  Protecting health care workers: a pandemic simulation based on Allegheny County , 2010, Influenza and other respiratory viruses.

[22]  John J. Grefenstette,et al.  A computer simulation of employee vaccination to mitigate an influenza epidemic. , 2010, American journal of preventive medicine.