Fig. 5.

Percentage of overlap as a function of time. The shaded area corresponds to the standard deviation obtained with 5·10³ couples of different realizations of the global spreading model based on a SIR dynamics within each city. Topological heterogeneity plays a dominant role in reducing the overlap in the early stage of the epidemics. We observe two different behaviors depending on the degree of the initially infected city: a reduced initial predictability in the case of airport hubs (Left) with respect to poorly connected cities (Right). Large fluctuations at the end of the epidemics are observed in the HETN and in the real case, due to the different lifetime of the epidemics in distinct realizations induced by the heterogeneity of the network. We also report the prevalence profile as a function of time showing that the maximum predictability corresponds to a prevalence peak.