  Human mobility plays a key role on the transformation of local disease
outbreaks into global pandemics. Thus, the inclusion of human movements into
epidemic models has become mandatory for understanding current epidemic
episodes and to design efficient prevention policies. Following this challenge,
here we develop a Markovian framework which enables to address the impact of
recurrent mobility patterns on the epidemic onset at different temporal scales.
This formalism is validated by comparing their predictions with results from
mechanistic simulations. The fair agreement between both theory and simulations
enables to get an analytical expression for the epidemic threshold which
captures the critical conditions triggering epidemic outbreaks. Finally, by
performing an exhaustive analysis of this epidemic threshold, we reveal that
the impact of tuning human mobility on the emergence of diseases is strongly
affected by the temporal scales associated to both epidemiological and mobility
processes.
