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Exploring the relationship between mobility and COVID− 19 infection rates for the second peak in the United States using phase-wise association
Abstract Human mobility plays an important role in the dynamics of infectious disease spread. Evidence from the initial nationwide lockdowns for COVID− 19 indicates that restricting human mobility is an effective strategy to contain the spread. While a direct correlation was observed early on, it is not known how mobility impacted COVID− 19 infection growth rates once lockdowns are lifted, primarily due to modulation by other factors such as face masks, social distancing, and the non-linear patterns of both mobility and infection growth. This paper introduces a piece-wise approach to better explore the phase-wise association between state-level COVID− 19 incidence data and anonymized mobile phone data for various states in the United States. Prior literature analyzed the linear correlation between mobility and the number of cases during the early stages of the pandemic. However, it is important to capture the non-linear dynamics of case growth and mobility to be usable for both tracking and forecasting COVID− 19 infections, which is accomplished by the piece-wise approach. The associations between mobility and case growth rate varied widely for various phases of the epidemic curve when the stay-at-home orders were lifted. The mobility growth patterns had a strong positive association of 0.7 with the growth in the more »
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Award ID(s):
Publication Date:
NSF-PAR ID:
10317279
Journal Name:
BMC Public Health
Volume:
21
Issue:
1
ISSN:
1471-2458
5. Abstract Hard-to-predict bursts of COVID-19 pandemic revealed significance of statistical modeling which would resolve spatio-temporal correlations over geographical areas, for example spread of the infection over a city with census tract granularity. In this manuscript, we provide algorithmic answers to the following two inter-related public health challenges of immense social impact which have not been adequately addressed (1) Inference Challenge assuming that there are N census blocks (nodes) in the city, and given an initial infection at any set of nodes, e.g. any N of possible single node infections, any $$N(N-1)/2$$ N ( N - 1 ) / 2 ofmore »