Abstract
The 2020 Atlantic hurricane season was extremely active and included, as of early November, six hurricanes that made landfall in the United States during the global coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‐19) pandemic. Such an event would necessitate a large‐scale evacuation, with implications for the trajectory of the pandemic. Here we model how a hypothetical hurricane evacuation from four counties in southeast Florida would affect COVID‐19 case levels. We find that hurricane evacuation increases the total number of COVID‐19 cases in both origin and destination locations; however, if transmission rates in destination counties can be kept from rising during evacuation, excess evacuation‐induced case numbers can be minimized by directing evacuees to counties experiencing lower COVID‐19 transmission rates. Ultimately, the number of excess COVID‐19 cases produced by the evacuation depends on the ability of destination counties to meet evacuee needs while minimizing virus exposure through public health directives. These results are relevant to disease transmission during evacuations stemming from additional climate‐related hazards such as wildfires and floods.
Highlights
The combination of the COVID-19 pandemic, existing racial and socioeconomic inequalities, and environmental stressors exacerbated by climate change is exposing the many ways in which “compound risks” threaten human lives and wellbeing while straining the ability of governments at all scales to limit the damage from any one threat on its own[1]
We evaluated the effects of six evacuation and epidemiological characteristics on COVID-19 case numbers: transmission rates in origin and destination counties, the fraction of the origin county population that evacuates (p ), the duration of the evacuation period (T ), and daily case numbers in the origin and destination counties
We found that transmission rates in the origin and destination counties were the primary determinant of case numbers (Methods; Figure 1b): evacuating individuals from a high-R origin to a low-R destination produced fewer additional cases in the origin county and in the origin and destination county combined
Summary
The combination of the COVID-19 pandemic, existing racial and socioeconomic inequalities, and environmental stressors exacerbated by climate change is exposing the many ways in which “compound risks” threaten human lives and wellbeing while straining the ability of governments at all scales to limit the damage from any one threat on its own[1]. With the anticipated peak of the 2020 Atlantic hurricane season approaching and COVID-19 cases widespread and abundant in many hurricane-prone areas of the United States, the nation is poised to experience the collision of two major disasters. With future global warming expected to continue the observed trend toward increasingly intense Atlantic hurricanes[4,5], understanding how to manage and minimize the impact of the combined risks associated with a major hurricane and a global pandemic could prove critical both later this year and in the long-term as the risks of such simultaneous disasters increase around the world. By changing the NOTE: This preprint reports new research that has not been certified by peer review and should not be used to guide clinical practice
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