News Finding: Population displacement can also affect the spread of vector-borne disease in a few ways, the researchers found.
Paper Finding: Data streams from these sources could be useful to quantify the level of public awareness during emergencies and may provide a useful proxy of the temporal profile of population displacement patterns away from the affected areas.
News Context: Considering that mosquitos have an average lifespan of less than two weeks, that temperature difference can have a dramatic effect on disease outbreaks." Population displacement can also affect the spread of vector-borne disease in a few ways, the researchers found. When people opt to leave the area, it reduces the number of local infections, while potentially increasing the number of infections elsewhere.
Paper Context: We do not model the latter, but note that it is potentially extremely important. Data streams from these sources could be useful to quantify the level of public awareness during emergencies and may provide a useful proxy of the temporal profile of population displacement patterns away from the affected areas. If these characteristics are correlated with mobility, and if evacuations are voluntary, we would expect Twitter data to overestimate the percentage of the population displaced.