Dirk Brockmann Quotations

If you want to understand how disease spreads, you need to understand how humans travel, because a lot of the time humans carry the disease from one place to the next. It's clear people travel long distances less often, but make a lot of short trips, but what are the details? How often are trips of a certain distance made?

The aim of our study was to be able to attach a number to human traveling behavior. If you want to understand how modern epidemics spread, you need to make some assumptions about how humans spread.

This is a very good estimate of how humans travel.

We can now plug in the parameter ranges that we think will apply to influenza and then simulate a pandemic that runs through Europe and see what happens.

There are some universal rules governing human travel and they can be used to develop a new class of model for the spread of infectious disease.

I think the greater significance of this is that human travel ... obeys some quite simple, independent rules.