When we move we carry many things with us: clothes, mobile phones, ideas, money… and also pathogens! In this work we construct the largest network of transfers of patients among US hospitals. We show that this transfer network actually correlates with cases of C.diff. infections.

Influence of a patient transfer network of US inpatient facilities on the incidence of nosocomial infections

J Fernández-Gracia, JP Onnela, ML Barnett, VM Eguíluz, NA Christakis

Scientific reports 7 (1), 1-9

The COVID-19 pandemic hit us hard all over the world. Islands are a suitable model for the study of their dynamics due to their quasi-isolation (even more during lockdown). During the first wave we studied the dynamics of the epidemics in the balearic islands and explored different scenarios for the risk of a second wave. The model we used is a typical SEIR model in a metapopulation context with recurrent mobility of agents. We were able to assess not only the risk of a secondary wave, but also the parameters of the model and the fraction of infected individuals that had gone unseen by the health monitoring system.

Risk of secondary infection waves of COVID-19 in an insular region: the case of the Balearic Islands, Spain

VM Eguíluz, J Fernández-Gracia, JP Rodríguez, JM Pericàs, C Melián

Frontiers in medicine 7, 905

Elections are crucial in democracy and their results form from different mechanisms from the individual to the collective. In this paper we show how a simple model of opinion competition, the Voter Model, with a realistic social context for the agents, based on the spatial population distribution and the commuting patterns of the individuals, is capable of reproducing statistical features of election results. In particular the model is able to capture the stationarity of the dispersion of vote-share distributions and the long range logarithmic decay in correlations of vote-shares.

Is the voter model a model for voters?

J Fernández-Gracia, K Suchecki, JJ Ramasco, M San Miguel, VM Eguíluz

Physical review letters 112 (15), 158701