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Disentangling the rhythms of human activity in the built environment for airborne transmission risk (preprint)
medrxiv; 2022.
Preprint in English | medRxiv | ID: ppzbmed-10.1101.2022.04.07.22273578
ABSTRACT
Since the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, substantial public attention has focused on the role of seasonality in suppressing transmission. Misconceptions have relied on seasonal mediation of respiratory diseases driven solely by environmental variables. However, seasonality is expected to be driven by host social behavior, particularly in highly susceptible populations. A key gap in understanding the role of social behavior in respiratory disease seasonality is our incomplete understanding of the seasonality of indoor human activity. We leverage a novel data stream on human mobility to characterize activity in indoor versus outdoor environments in the United States. We use a mobile app-based location dataset encompassing over 5 million locations nationally. We classify locations as primarily indoor (e.g. stores, offices) or outdoor (e.g. playgrounds, farmers markets), disentangling location-specific visitor counts into indoor and outdoor, to arrive at a fine-scale measure of indoor to outdoor human activity across time and space. We find the proportion of indoor to outdoor activity during a baseline year is seasonal, peaking in winter months. The measure displays a latitudinal gradient with stronger seasonality at northern latitudes and an additional summer peak in southern latitudes. We statistically fit this baseline indoor-outdoor activity measure to inform incorporation of this complex empirical pattern into infectious disease dynamic models. However, we find that the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic caused these patterns to shift significantly from baseline, and the empirical patterns are necessary to predict spatio-temporal heterogeneity in disease dynamics. Our work empirically characterizes, for the first time, the seasonality of human social behavior at a large-scale with high spatio-temporal resolution, and provides a parsimonious parameterization of seasonal behavior that can be included in infectious disease dynamics models. We provide critical evidence and methods necessary to inform the public health of seasonal and pandemic respiratory pathogens and improve our understanding of the relationship between the physical environment and infection risk in the context of global ecological change.
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Full text: Available Collection: Preprints Database: medRxiv Main subject: Respiratory Tract Diseases / Communicable Diseases / Seasonal Affective Disorder / COVID-19 Language: English Year: 2022 Document Type: Preprint

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Full text: Available Collection: Preprints Database: medRxiv Main subject: Respiratory Tract Diseases / Communicable Diseases / Seasonal Affective Disorder / COVID-19 Language: English Year: 2022 Document Type: Preprint