Exploring Urban Spatial Features of COVID-19 Transmission in Wuhan Based on Social Media Data

Zhenghong Peng,Ru Wang,Hao Wu,Lingbo Liu

doi:10.3390/ijgi9060402

Zhenghong Peng, Ru Wang + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/ijgi9060402

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Abstract

During the early stage of the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, there was a short run of medical resources, and Sina Weibo, a social media platform in China, built a channel for novel coronavirus pneumonia patients to seek help. Based on the geo-tagging Sina Weibo data from February 3rd to 12th, 2020, this paper analyzes the spatiotemporal distribution of COVID-19 cases in the main urban area of Wuhan and explores the urban spatial features of COVID-19 transmission in Wuhan. The results show that the elderly population accounts for more than half of the total number of Weibo help seekers, and a close correlation between them has also been found in terms of spatial distribution features, which confirms that the elderly population is the group of high-risk and high-prevalence in the COVID-19 outbreak, needing more attention of public health and epidemic prevention policies. On the other hand, the early transmission of COVID-19 in Wuhan could be divide into three phrases: Scattered infection, community spread, and full-scale outbreak. This paper can help to understand the spatial transmission of COVID-19 in Wuhan, so as to propose an effective public health preventive strategy for urban space optimization.

Highlights

In January 2020, the novel coronavirus pneumonia, COVID-19, broke out in Wuhan, the capital ofHubei province in China and the development of the epidemic has been a rising worldwide concern [1].In order to slow down and block the spread of the virus, Wuhan announced a shutdown on January23rd, 2020 to suspend the city’s public transportation and imposed an unprecedented restriction on personal mobility
This paper further explored the early spatiotemporal characteristics of the epidemic be regarded as the initial pathogen transmission, and the areas with the highest density levels hot spots can be regarded as the initial pathogen transmission, and the areas with the highest density transmission based on the infection time of COVID-19 cases provided by data.The
In the context of the outbreak of the COVID-19 in Wuhan, the spatiotemporal mapping is of vital importance to understand the spatial features of the new coronavirus transmission mechanism

Summary

Introduction

In January 2020, the novel coronavirus pneumonia, COVID-19, broke out in Wuhan, the capital ofHubei province in China and the development of the epidemic has been a rising worldwide concern [1].In order to slow down and block the spread of the virus, Wuhan announced a shutdown on January23rd, 2020 to suspend the city’s public transportation and imposed an unprecedented restriction on personal mobility. The effect of contact limitation gradually appeared after one month, which proves that for cities with high population density, severe restrictions on population movement can play a positive role in suppressing the spread of infectious diseases [2]. The existing researches include the spatial-temporal dynamics study of COVID-19 on the country level [3,4,5], with the deficiency of the detail reveal of the characteristics in the early stage in the urban space, which is critical for the development of prevention and control work in the city during the epidemic. The outbreak of COVID-19 verifies that epidemic prevention in public health is an essential part of urban planning and governance [6,7]. Preventive control nodes can deploy corresponding measures for specific groups and spaces [12,13]

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