Identifying communities at risk for COVID-19-related burden across 500 U.S. Cities and within New York City (preprint)

ABSTRACT

Background While it is well-known that older individuals with certain comorbidities are at highest risk for complications related to COVID-19 including hospitalization and death, we lack tools to identify communities at highest risk with fine-grained spatial and temporal resolution. Information collected at a county level obscures local risk and complex interactions between clinical comorbidities, the built environment, population factors, and other social determinants of health. Methods We develop a robust COVID-19 Community Risk Score (C-19 Risk Score) that summarizes the complex disease co-occurrences for individual census tracts with unsupervised learning, selected on their basis for association with risk for COVID complications, such as death. We mapped the C-19 Risk Score onto neighborhoods in New York City and associated the score with C-19 related death. We further predict the C-19 Risk Score using satellite imagery data to map the built environment in C-19 Risk. Results The C-19 Risk Score describes 85% of variation in co-occurrence of 15 diseases that are risk factors for COVID complications among 26K census tract neighborhoods (median population size of tracts 4,091). The C-19 Risk Score is associated with a 40% greater risk for COVID-19 related death across NYC (April and September 2020) for a 1SD change in the score (Risk Ratio for 1SD change in C19 Risk Score 1.4, p < .001). Satellite imagery coupled with social determinants of health explain nearly 90% of the variance in the C-19 Risk Score in the United States in held-out census tracts (R 2 of 0.87). Conclusions The C-19 Risk Score localizes COVID-19 risk at the census tract level and predicts COVID-19 related morbidity and mortality.