Abstract
One of the most concerning aspects of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is that it disproportionately affects people from some specific ethnic and socio-economic minorities. In particular, since from the beginning of the pandemic it has been clear that people from Black and African American backgrounds seem to be hit especially hard by the virus, creating a substantial infection gap. The observed abnormal impact on these ethnic groups could probably be due to the co-occurrence of other known risk factors, including co-morbidity, poverty, level of education, access to healthcare, residential segregation and response to cures, although those factors do not seem able to explain fully and in depth the excess incidence of infections and deaths among African Americans. Here, we introduce the concept of diffusion segregation, that is the extent to which a given group of people is internally clustered or exposed to other groups, as a result of mobility and commuting habits. By analysing census and mobility data on major US cities, we found that the weekly excess COVID-19 incidence and mortality in African American communities at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic is significantly associated with their level of diffusion segregation. The results confirm that knowing where people commute to, rather than where they live, is potentially much more important to contain and curb the spreading of infectious diseases.
Highlights
One of the most concerning aspects of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is that it disproportionately affects people from some specific ethnic and socio-economic minorities
By analysing census and mobility data on major US cities, we found that the weekly excess COVID-19 incidence and mortality in African American communities at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic is significantly associated with their level of diffusion segregation
Due to the particular characteristics of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which is mainly transmitted through face-to-face contacts [10] and whose bare transmission mechanism does not depend heavily on other pre-existing medical conditions, the substantially higher rates of COVID-19 infections registered among African American communities by different recent studies [11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18] are more than just unusual
Summary
One of the most concerning aspects of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is that it disproportionately affects people from some specific ethnic and socio-economic minorities. Ethnic and socio-economic minorities, including African Americans, are quite often subject to considerable disparities connected to health and healthcare, in particular regarding the prevalence of infectious [1,2,3], chronic [4] and other types of diseases [5,6], and their associated mortality rates While such disparities can be partially explained by socio-economic indicators, such as access to healthcare services [7], other variables seem to play a relevant role in determining them, including among others residential segregation [8,9]. Our hypothesis is that the observed infection gap is most probably due to a prevalence of super-spreading behaviours in African American communities, i.e. activities that contribute to increase the typical number and variety of face-to-face contacts of individuals—including for instance their job, habits, social life, commuting and mobility patterns—and that effectively make them more exposed to the infection. We propose here a method to define and quantify segregation that incorporates information about network topology and commuting patterns, and we show that this diffusion segregation is strongly associated with the abnormal incidence of COVID-19 in African American communities 2 across the USA
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