Association between population density and infection rate suggests the importance of social distancing and travel restriction in reducing the COVID-19 pandemic (original) (raw)
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Pattern and determinants of COVID-19 infection and mortality across countries: An ecological study
Heliyon, 2021
Background: This work aimed to identify the mathematical model and ecological determinants of COVID-19 infection and mortality across different countries during the first six months of the pandemic. Methodology: In this study, authors used the online available data sources of randomly selected 18 countries to figure out potential determinants of COVID-19 transmissibility and mortality. The studied variables were environmental factors (daily average temperature, daily humidity), socioeconomic attributes (population age structure, count and density, human development index, per capita income (PCI), gross domestic product, internet coverage) mobility trends and chronic diseases. Researchers used the linear and exponential time series analysis, and further utilized multivariate techniques to explain the variance in the monthly increase in cases and deaths. Results: In the first two months, the R 2 of linear models for the cases and deaths were higher than that of the corresponding R 2 of the exponential model. Later one, R 2 of the exponential model was occasionally relatively higher than that of the linear model. The exponential growth rate of new cases was significantly associated with mobility trends (β ¼ 0.00398, P ¼ 0.002), temperature (β ¼ 0.000679, P ¼ 0.011), humidity (β ¼ 0.000249, P < 0.001), and the proportion of population aged !65 years (β ¼-0.000959, P ¼ 0.012). Similarly, the exponential growth rate of deaths was significantly associated with mobility trends (β ¼ 0.0027, P ¼ 0.049), temperature (β ¼ 0.0014, P < 0.001), humidity (β ¼-0.0026, P < 0.001), and PCI of countries. During this period, COVID-19 transmissibility was evident to be controlled as soon as social mobility is decreased by about 40% of the baseline over 3 months controlling for the other predictors. Conclusion: Controlling of COVID-19 pandemic is based mainly on controlling social mobility. Role of environmental determinants like temperature and humidity was well noticed on disease fatality and transmissibility. Socio-demographic determinants of COVID-19 spread and fatality included modifiable risk factors like PCI and non-modifiable risk factors like ageing.
Clinical Infectious Diseases, 2020
Background The unprecedented outbreak of corona virus disease 2019 (COVID-19) infection in Wuhan City has caused global concern; the outflow of the population from Wuhan was believed to be a main reason for the rapid and large-scale spread of the disease, so the government implemented a city-closure measure to prevent its transmission considering the large amount of travel before the Chinese New Year. Methods Based on the daily reported new cases and the population-movement data between 1 and 31 January, we examined the effects of population outflow from Wuhan on the geographical expansion of the infection in other provinces and cities of China, as well as the impacts of the city closure in Wuhan using different closing-date scenarios. Results We observed a significantly positive association between population movement and the number of the COVID-19 cases. The spatial distribution of cases per unit of outflow population indicated that the infection in some areas with a large outflow...
The effect of human mobility and control measures on the COVID-19 epidemic in China
2020
The ongoing COVID-19 outbreak has expanded rapidly throughout China. Major behavioral, clinical, and state interventions are underway currently to mitigate the epidemic and prevent the persistence of the virus in human populations in China and worldwide. It remains unclear how these unprecedented interventions, including travel restrictions, have affected COVID-19 spread in China. We use real-time mobility data from Wuhan and detailed case data including travel history to elucidate the role of case importation on transmission in cities across China and ascertain the impact of control measures. Early on, the spatial distribution of COVID-19 cases in China was well explained by human mobility data. Following the implementation of control measures, this correlation dropped and growth rates became negative in most locations, although shifts in the demographics of reported cases are still indicative of local chains of transmission outside Wuhan. This study shows that the drastic control ...
Journal of Health Management
As the COVID-19 pandemic marches exponentially, epidemiological data is of high importance to analyse the current situation and guide intervention strategies. This study analyses the epidemiological data of COVID-19 from 17 countries, representing 85 per cent of the total cases within first 90 days of lockdown in Wuhan, China. It follows a population-level observational study design and includes countries with 20,000 cases (or higher) as of 21 April 2020. We sourced the data for these 17 countries from worldometers. info, a digital platform being used by several media and reputed academic institutions worldwide. We calculated the prevalence, incidence, case fatality rate and trends in the epidemiology of COVID-19, and its correlation with population density, urbanisation and elderly population. The analysis represents 85 per cent ( N = 2,183,661) of all cases within the first 90 days of the pandemic. Across the analysed period, the burden of the pandemic primarily focused on high- a...
Global expansion of COVID-19 pandemic is driven by population size and airport connections
PeerJ, 2020
The pandemic state of COVID-19 caused by the SARS CoV-2 put the world in quarantine, led to hundreds of thousands of deaths and is causing an unprecedented economic crisis. However, COVID-19 is spreading in different rates at different countries. Here, we tested the effect of three classes of predictors, i.e., socioeconomic, climatic and transport, on the rate of daily increase of COVID-19 on its exponential phase. We found that population size and global connections, represented by countries’ importance in the global air transportation network, are the main explanations for the early growth rate of COVID-19 in different countries. Climate and socioeconomics had no significant effect in this big picture analysis. Our results indicate that the current claims that the growth rate of COVID-19 may be lower in warmer and humid countries should be taken very carefully, risking to disturb well-established and effective policy of social isolation that may help to avoid higher mortality rate...
The Correlation of Mobility Trend and Situation of COVID-19 by Country, Territory, and Area
Jurnal Kedokteran dan Kesehatan Publikasi Ilmiah Fakultas Kedokteran Universitas Sriwijaya, 2021
Each country around the world has taken several approaches in order to stop the spreading of the virus. This study was conducted to correlate the mobility trend and the situation of COVID-19 by country, territory, and area. This research paper adopts an observational analytic study with a cross-sectional approach for 115 countries from February 17th to August 27th, 2020. Tajikistan (r=0,956) and Italy (r=0,931) has the highest positive correlation for retail and recreations. For grocery,the highest degree of positive correlation is Mongolia (r=0,945) and Tajikistan (r=0,933). Bostwana and Italy showed highest significant positive correlation among countries (r=0,985 and r=0,902, respectively) for transit stations and residential (r=0,994 and r=0,984). Bostwana also has the highest significant positive correlation for the park (r=0.980). Meanwhile, for the workplace, Mauritius (r=0,863) and Dominica (r=0,785) are countries with the highest degree of positive correlation with a cumul...
Investigation of the effects of urban density on pandemic
2021
Decisions regarding land use are amongst the most important decisions of a city planning process, and density arrangement is one of the key parameters for it. The effects of urban density on the Covid-19 infection are evaluated in this study through the sample case of İskenderun district, which was divided into 3 main urban population density regions (high, medium, low). The course of the Covid-19 pandemic was then followed through the number of cases in the period of September-December 2020 for these regions. The case data were obtained from the "HES" application developed by the Ministry of Health of the Republic of Turkey to monitor the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic, and the case density maps recorded in the application for this purpose were digitized through an in-house image processing software. As a result of the examination, it was understood that the rate of increase and the density of cases in regions with high housing density was higher than that of regions wit...
Environmental Geochemistry and Health, 2021
With the expansion of the global novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, unprecedented interventions have been widely implemented in many countries, including China. In view of this scenario, this research aims to explore the effectiveness of population mobility restriction in alleviating epidemic transmission during different stages of the outbreak. Taking Shenzhen, a city with a large immigrant population in China, as a case study, the real-time reproduction number of COVID-19 is estimated by statistical methods to represent the dynamic spatiotemporal transmission pattern of COVID-19. Furthermore, migration data between Shenzhen and other provinces are collected to investigate the impact of nationwide population flow on near-real-time dynamic reproductive numbers. The results show that traffic flow control between populated cities has an inhibitory effect on urban transmission, but this effect is not significant in the late stage of the epidemic spread in China. This finding implies that the government should limit international and domestic population movement starting from the very early stage of the outbreak. This work confirms the effectiveness of travel restriction measures in the face of COVID-19 in China and provides new insight for densely populated cities in imposing intervention measures at various stages of the transmission cycle. Keywords Real-time reproduction number Á COVID-19 Á Population mobility Á Correlation analysis Á Shenzhen Honglu Ji and Huan Tong have contributed equally to this work.
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