#31 · Systems biology

Temporal scale, noise and predictability shape mosquito-borne outbreak structure

The dominant thread is that outbreak structure in urban mosquito-borne systems is not captured by R0 alone. A pairwise interaction-kernel model of dengue, Zika and chikungunya spread in Recife reports that the three diseases differ only beyond a critical temporal scale, making transmission signatures scale dependent. A stochastic Ross-Macdonald analysis finds that noise lowers endemic risk, yields the largest outbreaks at intermediate noise levels, and shows that R0 alone cannot predict outbreaks. A spectral-entropy forecastability study of influenza and COVID-19 hospital admission targets, which is not vector-borne, similarly finds that predictability varies across seasons and pathogens, linked to population size. What is new is the joint treatment of temporal scale, stochasticity and predictability as explicit determinants of outbreak structure.