ESCAPE - Epidemiologically Significant Clusters for Adaptive Preparedness in the Ebola Epidemic

The ESCAPE project aims to redefine epidemic response strategies in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) by identifying and leveraging epidemiologically significant spatial clusters emerging from population mobility data. Focused on the 2014-2015 Ebola epidemic in Guinea, ESCAPE will harness anonymized mobile phone data from approximately 9 million users and detailed prefectural-level epidemiological reports to better align intervention strategies with real-world transmission dynamics. The project addresses a critical shortcoming in traditional public health interventions: their reliance on static administrative boundaries, which may not correspond to the actual patterns of disease spread shaped by human movement. ESCAPE will extract mobility-driven spatial clusters and assess their potential as dynamic, data-informed units for targeted public health action. ESCAPE pursues two main objectives: (1) identify mobility-based clusters using network science applied to mobile phone data; and (2) simulate the impact of interventions targeting these clusters using metapopulation epidemic models. By comparing these results with historically applied administrative-boundary strategies, ESCAPE will quantify gains in epidemic mitigation and societal burden reduction. This project will offer a paradigmatically novel solution for outbreak preparedness in resource-constrained settings, with potential implications for managing other mobility-sensitive infectious diseases.