Mathematical Modeling of Pulse‐Seeded Metapopulation Dynamics for Andes Hantavirus Border Dispersal

Source abstract

ABSTRACT Andes hantavirus (ANDV) is the only hantavirus known to undergo sustained human‐to‐human transmission, rendering maritime outbreak scenarios uniquely dangerous due to the abrupt, simultaneous repatriation of a potentially exposed cohort to multiple countries with heterogeneous quarantine regimes. Motivated by the April–May 2026 outbreak aboard the MV Hondius, in which passengers were repatriated to six countries following confirmed ANDV cases, we develop the metapopulation compartmental model tailored to this “maritime source, multi‐country sink” structure. The model couples a shipboard SEIR source patch to destination country patches via a pulse dispersal operator that instantaneously seeds each country with a proportional fraction of the exposed shipboard cohort at the moment of disembarkation. Within each destination patch, disease dynamics are governed by a classical SEIR system with a country‐specific quarantine compliance parameter that modulates the effective transmission rate. We derive closed‐form expressions for the patch‐level basic reproduction number , establish a critical compliance threshold below which secondary outbreaks are guaranteed, and derive the global metapopulation reproduction number . Numerical simulations calibrated to ANDV natural history parameters ( days, case fatality ) across six hypothetical destination countries demonstrate that even moderate non‐compliance () can sustain in high‐transmission patches, while uniform compliance above is sufficient to achieve globally.