Patterns of exposure to SARS-CoV-2 carriers manifest multiscale association between urban landscape morphology and human activity.
Sci Rep
; 11(1): 22120, 2021 11 11.
Article
in English
| MEDLINE | ID: covidwho-1758321
ABSTRACT
The outbreak of the Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), and the drastic measures taken to mitigate its spread through imposed social distancing, have brought forward the need to better understand the underlying factors controlling spatial distribution of human activities promoting disease transmission. Focusing on results from 17,250 epidemiological investigations performed during early stages of the pandemic outbreak in Israel, we show that the distribution of carriers of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2), which causes COVID-19, is spatially correlated with two satellite-derived surface metrics night light intensity and landscape patchiness, the latter being a measure to the urban landscape's scale-dependent spatial heterogeneity. We find that exposure to SARS-CoV-2 carriers was significantly more likely to occur in "patchy" parts of the city, where the urban landscape is characterized by high levels of spatial heterogeneity at relatively small, tens of meters scales. We suggest that this spatial association reflects a scale-dependent constraint imposed by the city's morphology on the cumulative behavior of the people inhabiting it. The presented results shed light on the complex interrelationships between humans and the urban landscape in which they live and interact, and open new avenues for implementation of multi-satellite data in large scale modeling of phenomena centered in urban environments.
Full text:
Available
Collection:
International databases
Database:
MEDLINE
Main subject:
COVID-19
Type of study:
Observational study
Limits:
Humans
Country/Region as subject:
Asia
Language:
English
Journal:
Sci Rep
Year:
2021
Document Type:
Article
Affiliation country:
S41598-021-01257-8
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