Modelling the dynamic relationship between spread of infection and observed crowd movement patterns at large scale events

Abstract

Understanding how contact patterns arise from crowd movement is crucial for assessing the spread of infection at mass gathering events. Here we study contact patterns from Wi-Fi mobility data of large sports and entertainment events in the Johan Cruijff ArenA stadium in Amsterdam. We show that crowd movement behaviour at mass gathering events is not homogeneous in time, but naturally consists of alternating periods of movement and rest. As a result, contact duration distributions are heavy-tailed, an observation which is not explained by models assuming that pedestrian contacts are analogous to collisions in the kinetic gas model. We investigate the effect of heavy-tailed contact duration patterns on the spread of infection using various random walk models. We show how different types of intermittent movement behaviour interact with a time-dependent infection probability. Our results point to the existence of a crossover point where increased contact duration presents a higher level of transmission risk than increasing the number of contacts. In addition, we show that different types of intermittent movement behaviour give rise to different mass-action kinetics, but also show that neither one of two mass-action mechanisms uniquely describes events.