Crowd and environmental management during mass gatherings[1]
Summary
This review considers crowd and environmental management during mass gatherings, noting that crowds are a feature of large cities and occur not only at mass gatherings but also at routine events such as the journey to work. The authors review the various computer models for crowd movement developed over the previous decade to address extreme crowding, and show how these models can be used to identify health and safety issues. They observe that state-of-the-art models simulating the spread of epidemics operate at population level, and suggest that collecting fine-scale data might enable development of epidemic models operating on a microscopic scale, similar to models for crowd movement. The paper provides an example of such simulations, showing how an individual-based crowd model can mirror the aggregate susceptible-infected-recovered models that have been the main models for epidemics so far. The abstract reports a methodological demonstration and gives no event counts or effect sizes.
So what
For planners this links two things usually handled by separate teams, physical crowd flow and disease transmission risk, and suggests the same movement data could inform both. It is a review with an illustrative simulation, so it supports investing in crowd-movement data collection and modelling capability rather than establishing any particular density limit or screening rule.
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