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Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic brought unprecedented changes to various aspects of daily life, profoundly affecting human mobility. These changes in mobility patterns were not uniform, as numerous factors, including public health measures, socioeconomic status, and urban infrastructure, influenced them. This study examines human mobility changes during COVID-19 in San Diego County and New York City, employing Latent Profile Analysis (LPA) and various network measures to analyze connectivity and socioeconomic status (SES) within these regions. While many COVID-19 and mobility studies have revealed overall reductions in mobility or changes in mobility patterns, they often fail to specify ’where’ these changes occur and lack a detailed understanding of the relationship between SES and mobility changes. This creates a significant research gap in understanding the spatial and socioeconomic dimensions of mobility changes during the pandemic. This study aims to address this gap by providing a comprehensive analysis of how mobility patterns varied across different socioeconomic groups during the pandemic. By comparing mobility patterns before and during the pandemic, we aim to shed light on how this unprecedented event impacted different communities. Our research contributes to the literature by employing network science to examine COVID-19’s impact on human mobility, integrating SES variables into the analysis of mobility networks. This approach provides a detailed understanding of how social and economic factors influence movement patterns and urban connectivity, highlighting disparities in mobility and access across different socioeconomic groups. The results identify areas functioning as hubs or bridges and illustrate how these roles changed during COVID-19, revealing existing societal inequalities. Specifically, we observed that urban parks and rural areas with national parks became significant mobility hubs during the pandemic, while affluent areas with high educational attainment saw a decline in centrality measures, indicating a shift in urban mobility dynamics and exacerbating pre-existing socioeconomic disparities.
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The COVID-19 pandemic and social cognitive outcomes in early childhood
Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic and ensuing lockdowns led to sweeping changes in the everyday lives of children and families, including school closures, remote work and learning, and social distancing. To date no study has examined whether these profound changes in young children’s day to day social interactions impacted the development of social cognition skills in early childhood. To address this question, we compared the performance of two cohorts of 3.5- to 5.5-year-old children tested before and after the COVID-19 lockdowns on several measures of false-belief understanding, a critical social cognition skill that undergoes important developments in this age range. Controlling for age and language skills, children tested after the pandemic demonstrated significantly worse false-belief understanding than those tested before the pandemic, and this difference was larger for children from lower socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds. These results suggest that the pandemic negatively impacted the development of social cognition skills in early childhood, especially for lower SES children.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1844416
- PAR ID:
- 10556330
- Publisher / Repository:
- Nature Publishing Group
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Scientific Reports
- Volume:
- 14
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 2045-2322
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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