Chapter 4 - The impacts of the built environment factors and population mobility on the spread of COVID-19 during its initial stage of the COVID-19 pandemic: A case of China

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has greatly disrupted human mobility and economic development globally. The built environment (BE) can contribute to the spread of COVID-19, as well as other infectious diseases, by facilitating human mobility and social contacts between infected and susceptible individuals. It can also provide a space that directly transmits pathogens to the people. Thus more attention should be given to preventing the spread of such diseases through urban planning and management. At present, knowledge about how the built environment affects the COVID-19 spread is limited. In this chapter, we firstly introduce how the built environment can affect public health, then objectively evaluate the influence of key built environment factors on the spread of COVID-19 through a random forest approach across 2994 townships in China in the initial stages of the pandemic. To represent the spread of COVID-19, the ratio of cumulative infection cases (RCIC) and the coefficient of variation of infection cases (CVIC) that reflects the policy effects in the initial stages of the pandemic are selected.