A large number of transients visit big cities on any given day and they visit crowded areas and come in contact with many people. However, epidemiological studies have not paid much attention to the role of this subpopulation in disease spread. In the present work, we extend a synthetic population model of Washington DC metro area to include leisure and business travelers. This approach involves combining Census data, activity surveys, and geospatial data to build a detailed minute-by-minute simulation of population interaction. We simulate a flu-like disease outbreak both with and without the transient population to evaluate the effect of the transients on outbreak size and peak day in terms of number of residents infected. Results show that there are significantly more infections when transients are considered. We also evaluate interventions like closing big museums and encouraging use of hand sanitizers at those musuems. Surprisingly closing musuems does not result in a significant difference in the epidemic. However, we find that if the use of hand sanitizer reduces the infectivity and suceptibility to 80% or 60% of the original values, it is as effective as closing museums for a few days or entirely eliminating the effect of transients. If infectivity and susceptibility are reduced to 40% or 20%, it reduces the number of resident infections over the period of 120 days by 10% and 13%.

We present a bi-threshold model of complex contagion in networks. In this model a node in a network can be in one of two states at any time step, and changes state if enough of its neighbors are in the opposite state, as determined by “up-threshold” and “down-threshold” parameters. This dynamical process models several types of social contagion processes, such as public health concerns and the spread of games on online networks. Motivated by recent literature calling for the investigation of peer pressure to reduce obesity, which can be viewed as a control problem of population dynamics, we focus on the computational complexity of finding critical sets of nodes, which are nodes that we choose to freeze in state 0 (a desirable state) in order to inhibit the spread of an undesirable state 1 in the network. We define a minimum-cost critical set problem and show that it is NP-complete for bi-threshold systems. We show that several versions of the problem can be approximated to within a factor of O(log n), where n is the number of nodes in the network. Using the ideas behind these approximations, we devise a heuristic, called the Maximum Contributor Heuristic (MCH), which can be used even when the diffusion model is probabilistic. We perform simulations with well-known networks from the literature and show that MCH outperforms the High Degree Heuristic by several orders of magnitude.