Strategies and inequities in balancing recreation and COVID exposure when visiting green spaces

Green spaces are beneficial for physical and mental health, especially during and after disasters. The COVID-19 pandemic, however, created a trade-off: parks could be therapeutic but also could expose people to infection. This paradox posed inequities as marginalized populations often have less access to parks and were hit harder by the pandemic. We combined cellphone-generated mobility data with demographic indicators, a neighborhood survey, and local infection rates to examine how residents of Boston, MA, navigated this trade-off in April?August 2020. We hypothesized that they adopted strategies for mitigating infection exposure?including fewer park visits and prioritizing parks that might have lower infection risk, including larger parks with more opportunity for social distancing and parks near home with fewer unfamiliar faces?but that marginalized populations would have less opportunity to do so. We also introduce a novel measure of exposure per visit based on the volume of other visitors, infection rates, and park size. Bostonians made fewer park visits relative to 2019 and prioritized larger parks and parks closer to home. These strategies varied by community. Experiences of the pandemic were influential, as communities that perceived greater risk or had more infections made more park visits, likely because they were a relatively safe activity. Communities with more infections tended to avoid nearby parks. Inequities were also apparent. Communities with more Black residents and infections had greater infection exposure per visit even when controlling for the types of parks visited, highlighting difficulties in escaping the challenges of the pandemic.

A multisource database tracking the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the communities of Boston, MA, USA.

A pandemic, like other disasters, changes how systems work. In order to support research on how the COVID-19 pandemic impacted the dynamics of a single metropolitan area and the communities therein, we developed and made publicly available a "data-support system" for the city of Boston. We actively gathered data from multiple administrative (e.g., 911 and 311 dispatches, building permits) and internet sources (e.g., Yelp, Craigslist), capturing aspects of housing and land use, crime and disorder, and commercial activity and institutions. All the data were linked spatially through BARI's Geographical Infrastructure, enabling conjoint analysis. We curated the base records and aggregated them to construct ecometric measures (i.e., descriptors of a place) at various geographic scales, all of which were also published as part of the database. The datasets were published in an open repository, each accompanied by a detailed documentation of methods and variables. We anticipate updating the database annually to maintain the tracking of the records and associated measures.

Vaccination intentions generate racial disparities in the societal persistence of COVID-19.

We combined survey, mobility, and infections data in greater Boston, MA to simulate the effects of racial disparities in the inclination to become vaccinated on continued infection rates and the attainment of herd immunity. The simulation projected marked inequities, with communities of color experiencing infection rates 3 times higher than predominantly White communities and reaching herd immunity 45 days later on average. Persuasion of individuals uncertain about vaccination was crucial to preventing the worst inequities but could only narrow them so far because 1/5th of Black and Latinx individuals said that they would never vaccinate. The results point to a need for well-crafted, compassionate messaging that reaches out to those most resistant to the vaccine.