scholarly journals Relationships between Local Green Space and Human Mobility Patterns during COVID-19 for Maryland and California, USA

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (22) ◽  
pp. 9401
Author(s):  
Seulkee Heo ◽  
Chris C. Lim ◽  
Michelle L. Bell

Human mobility is a significant factor for disease transmission. Little is known about how the environment influences mobility during a pandemic. The aim of this study was to investigate an effect of green space on mobility reductions during the early stage of the COVID-19 pandemic in Maryland and California, USA. For 230 minor civil divisions (MCD) in Maryland and 341 census county divisions (CCD) in California, we obtained mobility data from Facebook Data for Good aggregating information of people using the Facebook app on their mobile phones with location history active. The users’ movement between two locations was used to calculate the number of users that traveled into an MCD (or CCD) for each day in the daytime hours between 11 March and 26 April 2020. Each MCD’s (CCD’s) vegetation level was estimated as the average Enhanced Vegetation Index (EVI) level for 1 January through 31 March 2020. We calculated the number of state and local parks, food retail establishments, and hospitals for each MCD (CCD). Results showed that the daily percent changes in the number of travels declined during the study period. This mobility reduction was significantly lower in Maryland MCDs with state parks (p-value = 0.045), in California CCDs with local-scale parks (p-value = 0.048). EVI showed no association with mobility in both states. This finding has implications for the potential impacts of green space on mobility under an outbreak. Future studies are needed to explore these findings and to investigate changes in health effects of green space during a pandemic.

Author(s):  
Shuhei Nomura ◽  
Yuta Tanoue ◽  
Daisuke Yoneoka ◽  
Stuart Gilmour ◽  
Takayuki Kawashima ◽  
...  

AbstractIn the COVID-19 era, movement restrictions are crucial to slow virus transmission and have been implemented in most parts of the world, including Japan. To find new insights on human mobility and movement restrictions encouraged (but not forced) by the emergency declaration in Japan, we analyzed mobility data at 35 major stations and downtown areas in Japan—each defined as an area overlaid by several 125-meter grids—from September 1, 2019 to March 19, 2021. Data on the total number of unique individuals per hour passing through each area were obtained from Yahoo Japan Corporation (i.e., more than 13,500 data points for each area). We examined the temporal trend in the ratio of the rolling seven-day daily average of the total population to a baseline on January 16, 2020, by ten-year age groups in five time frames. We demonstrated that the degree and trend of mobility decline after the declaration of a state of emergency varies across age groups and even at the subregional level. We demonstrated that monitoring dynamic geographic and temporal mobility information stratified by detailed population characteristics can help guide not only exit strategies from an ongoing emergency declaration, but also initial response strategies before the next possible resurgence. Combining such detailed data with data on vaccination coverage and COVID-19 incidence (including the status of the health care delivery system) can help governments and local authorities develop community-specific mobility restriction policies. This could include strengthening incentives to stay home and raising awareness of cognitive errors that weaken people's resolve to refrain from nonessential movement.


2021 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. Potgieter ◽  
I. N. Fabris-Rotelli ◽  
Z. Kimmie ◽  
N. Dudeni-Tlhone ◽  
J. P. Holloway ◽  
...  

The COVID-19 pandemic starting in the first half of 2020 has changed the lives of everyone across the world. Reduced mobility was essential due to it being the largest impact possible against the spread of the little understood SARS-CoV-2 virus. To understand the spread, a comprehension of human mobility patterns is needed. The use of mobility data in modelling is thus essential to capture the intrinsic spread through the population. It is necessary to determine to what extent mobility data sources convey the same message of mobility within a region. This paper compares different mobility data sources by constructing spatial weight matrices at a variety of spatial resolutions and further compares the results through hierarchical clustering. We consider four methods for constructing spatial weight matrices representing mobility between spatial units, taking into account distance between spatial units as well as spatial covariates. This provides insight for the user into which data provides what type of information and in what situations a particular data source is most useful.


2014 ◽  
Vol 11 (100) ◽  
pp. 20140834 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiao-Yong Yan ◽  
Chen Zhao ◽  
Ying Fan ◽  
Zengru Di ◽  
Wen-Xu Wang

Despite the long history of modelling human mobility, we continue to lack a highly accurate approach with low data requirements for predicting mobility patterns in cities. Here, we present a population-weighted opportunities model without any adjustable parameters to capture the underlying driving force accounting for human mobility patterns at the city scale. We use various mobility data collected from a number of cities with different characteristics to demonstrate the predictive power of our model. We find that insofar as the spatial distribution of population is available, our model offers universal prediction of mobility patterns in good agreement with real observations, including distance distribution, destination travel constraints and flux. By contrast, the models that succeed in modelling mobility patterns in countries are not applicable in cities, which suggests that there is a diversity of human mobility at different spatial scales. Our model has potential applications in many fields relevant to mobility behaviour in cities, without relying on previous mobility measurements.


2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (49) ◽  
pp. eabd6370 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sen Pei ◽  
Sasikiran Kandula ◽  
Jeffrey Shaman

Assessing the effects of early nonpharmaceutical interventions on coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) spread is crucial for understanding and planning future control measures to combat the pandemic. We use observations of reported infections and deaths, human mobility data, and a metapopulation transmission model to quantify changes in disease transmission rates in U.S. counties from 15 March to 3 May 2020. We find that marked, asynchronous reductions of the basic reproductive number occurred throughout the United States in association with social distancing and other control measures. Counterfactual simulations indicate that, had these same measures been implemented 1 to 2 weeks earlier, substantial cases and deaths could have been averted and that delayed responses to future increased incidence will facilitate a stronger rebound of infections and death. Our findings underscore the importance of early intervention and aggressive control in combatting the COVID-19 pandemic.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Takahiro Yabe ◽  
Kota Tsubouchi ◽  
Naoya Fujiwara ◽  
Takayuki Wada ◽  
Yoshihide Sekimoto ◽  
...  

Abstract While large scale mobility data has become a popular tool to monitor the mobility patterns during the COVID-19 pandemic, the impacts of non-compulsory measures in Tokyo, Japan on human mobility patterns has been under-studied. Here, we analyze the temporal changes in human mobility behavior, social contact rates, and their correlations with the transmissibility of COVID-19, using mobility data collected from more than 200K anonymized mobile phone users in Tokyo. The analysis concludes that by April 15th (1 week into state of emergency), human mobility behavior decreased by around 50%, resulting in a 70% reduction of social contacts in Tokyo, showing the strong relationships with non-compulsory measures. Furthermore, the reduction in data-driven human mobility metrics showed correlation with the decrease in estimated effective reproduction number of COVID-19 in Tokyo. Such empirical insights could inform policy makers on deciding sufficient levels of mobility reduction to contain the disease.


2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (5) ◽  
pp. 160950 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cecilia Panigutti ◽  
Michele Tizzoni ◽  
Paolo Bajardi ◽  
Zbigniew Smoreda ◽  
Vittoria Colizza

The recent availability of large-scale call detail record data has substantially improved our ability of quantifying human travel patterns with broad applications in epidemiology. Notwithstanding a number of successful case studies, previous works have shown that using different mobility data sources, such as mobile phone data or census surveys, to parametrize infectious disease models can generate divergent outcomes. Thus, it remains unclear to what extent epidemic modelling results may vary when using different proxies for human movements. Here, we systematically compare 658 000 simulated outbreaks generated with a spatially structured epidemic model based on two different human mobility networks: a commuting network of France extracted from mobile phone data and another extracted from a census survey. We compare epidemic patterns originating from all the 329 possible outbreak seed locations and identify the structural network properties of the seeding nodes that best predict spatial and temporal epidemic patterns to be alike. We find that similarity of simulated epidemics is significantly correlated to connectivity, traffic and population size of the seeding nodes, suggesting that the adequacy of mobile phone data for infectious disease models becomes higher when epidemics spread between highly connected and heavily populated locations, such as large urban areas.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nishant Kishore ◽  
Rebecca Kahn ◽  
Pamela P. Martinez ◽  
Pablo M. De Salazar ◽  
Ayesha S. Mahmud ◽  
...  

ABSTRACTIn response to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, unprecedented policies of travel restrictions and stay-at-home orders were enacted around the world. Ultimately, the public’s response to announcements of lockdowns - defined here as restrictions on both local movement or long distance travel - will determine how effective these kinds of interventions are. Here, we measure the impact of the announcement and implementation of lockdowns on human mobility patterns by analyzing aggregated mobility data from mobile phones. We find that following the announcement of lockdowns, both local and long distance movement increased. To examine how these behavioral responses to lockdown policies may contribute to epidemic spread, we developed a simple agent-based spatial model. We find that travel surges following announcements of lockdowns can increase seeding of the epidemic in rural areas, undermining the goal of the lockdown of preventing disease spread. Appropriate messaging surrounding the announcement of lockdowns and measures to decrease unnecessary travel are important for preventing these unintended consequences of lockdowns.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathy Leung ◽  
Joseph T Wu ◽  
Gabriel M Leung

AbstractDigital proxies of human mobility and physical mixing have been used to monitor viral transmissibility and effectiveness of social distancing interventions in the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. We developed a new framework that parameterizes disease transmission models with age-specific digital mobility data. By fitting the model to case data in Hong Kong, we were able to accurately track the local effective reproduction number of COVID-19 in near real time (i.e. no longer constrained by the delay of around 9 days between infection and reporting of cases) which is essential for quick assessment of the effectiveness of interventions on reducing transmissibility. Our findings showed that accurate nowcast and forecast of COVID-19 epidemics can be obtained by integrating valid digital proxies of physical mixing into conventional epidemic models.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Telle Olivier ◽  
Samuel Benkimoun ◽  
Richard Paul

ResuméCombined with sanitation and social distancing measures, control of human mobility has quickly been targeted as a major leverage to contain the spread of SARS-CoV-2 in a great majority of countries worldwide. The extent to which such measures were successful, however, is uncertain (Gibbs et al. 2020; Kraemer et al. 2020). Very few studies are quantifying the relation between mobility, lockdown strategies and the diffusion of the virus in different countries. Using the anonymised data collected by one of the major social media platforms (Facebook) combined with spatial and temporal Covid-19 data, the objective of this research is to understand how mobility patterns and SARS-CoV-2 diffusion during the first wave are connected in four different countries: the west coast of the USA, Colombia, Sweden and France. Our analyses suggest a relatively modest impact of lockdown on the spread of the virus at the national scale. Despite a varying impact of lockdown on mobility reduction in these countries (83% in France and Colombia, 55% in USA, 10% in Sweden), no country successfully implemented control measures to stem the spread of the virus. As observed in Hubei (Chinazzi et al. 2020), it is likely that the virus had already spread very widely prior to lockdown; the number of affected administrative units in all countries was already very high at the time of lockdown despite the low testing levels. The second conclusion is that the integration of mobility data considerably improved the epidemiological model (as revealed by the QAIC). If inter-individual contact is a fundamental element in the study of the spread of infectious diseases, it is also the case at the level of administrative units. However, this relational dimension is little understood beyond the individual scale mostly due to the lack of mobility data at this scale. Fortunately, these types of data are getting increasingly provided by social media or mobile operators, and they can be used to help administrations to observe changes in movement patterns and/or to better locate where to implement disease control measures such as vaccination (Pollina & Busvine 2020; Pullano et al. 2020; Romm et al. 2020).


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dursun Delen ◽  
Enes Eryarsoy ◽  
Behrooz Davazdahemami

BACKGROUND In the absence of a cure in the time of a pandemic, social distancing measures seem to be the most effective intervention to slow the spread of disease. Various simulation-based studies have been conducted to investigate the effectiveness of these measures. While those studies unanimously confirm the mitigating effect of social distancing on disease spread, the reported effectiveness varies from 10% to more than 90% reduction in the number of infections. This level of uncertainty is mostly due to the complex dynamics of epidemics and their time-variant parameters. However, real transactional data can reduce uncertainty and provide a less noisy picture of the effectiveness of social distancing. OBJECTIVE The aim of this paper was to integrate multiple transactional data sets (GPS mobility data from Google and Apple as well as disease statistics from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control) to study the role of social distancing policies in 26 countries and analyze the transmission rate of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic over the course of 5 weeks. METHODS Relying on the susceptible-infected-recovered (SIR) model and official COVID-19 reports, we first calculated the weekly transmission rate (<i>β</i>) of COVID-19 in 26 countries for 5 consecutive weeks. Then, we integrated these data with the Google and Apple mobility data sets for the same time frame and used a machine learning approach to investigate the relationship between the mobility factors and <i>β</i> values. RESULTS Gradient boosted trees regression analysis showed that changes in mobility patterns resulting from social distancing policies explain approximately 47% of the variation in the disease transmission rates. CONCLUSIONS Consistent with simulation-based studies, real cross-national transactional data confirms the effectiveness of social distancing interventions in slowing the spread of COVID-19. In addition to providing less noisy and more generalizable support for the idea of social distancing, we provide specific insights for public health policy makers regarding locations that should be given higher priority for enforcing social distancing measures.


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