Abstract
The outbreak of the Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), and the drastic measures taken to mitigate its spread through imposed social distancing, have brought forward the need to better understand the underlying factors controlling spatial distribution of human activities promoting disease transmission. Focusing on results from 17,250 epidemiological investigations performed during early stages of the pandemic outbreak in Israel, we show that the distribution of carriers of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2), which causes COVID-19, is spatially correlated with two satellite-derived surface metrics: night light intensity and landscape patchiness, the latter being a measure to the urban landscape’s scale-dependent spatial heterogeneity. We find that exposure to SARS-CoV-2 carriers was significantly more likely to occur in “patchy” parts of the city, where the urban landscape is characterized by high levels of spatial heterogeneity at relatively small, tens of meters scales. We suggest that this spatial association reflects a scale-dependent constraint imposed by the city’s morphology on the cumulative behavior of the people inhabiting it. The presented results shed light on the complex interrelationships between humans and the urban landscape in which they live and interact, and open new avenues for implementation of multi-satellite data in large scale modeling of phenomena centered in urban environments.
Highlights
The outbreak of the Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), and the drastic measures taken to mitigate its spread through imposed social distancing, have brought forward the need to better understand the underlying factors controlling spatial distribution of human activities promoting disease transmission
Following the large body of work on the spatial aspects of disease spread in general, and of COVID-19 in particular, here we address the important, yet poorly investigated question of whether predictable relationships can be found between urban landscape, human activity, and patterns of exposure to SARS-CoV-2
We find that average landscape patchiness index (LPI) and nighttime light (NTL) values are significantly higher at locations with reported reported locations of SARS-CoV-2 carriers (RLSC) in 77% and 90% of the cities, respectively
Summary
The outbreak of the Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), and the drastic measures taken to mitigate its spread through imposed social distancing, have brought forward the need to better understand the underlying factors controlling spatial distribution of human activities promoting disease transmission. Focusing on results from 17,250 epidemiological investigations performed during early stages of the pandemic outbreak in Israel, we show that the distribution of carriers of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2), which causes COVID-19, is spatially correlated with two satellite-derived surface metrics: night light intensity and landscape patchiness, the latter being a measure to the urban landscape’s scale-dependent spatial heterogeneity. We hypothesize that patterns of heterogeneity in the urban landscape impose spatially varying constraints on interpersonal proximity and crowding conditions, affecting the potential for the spread of COVID-19 To test this hypothesis, we investigate the spatial association between patterns of exposure to SARS-CoV-2 carriers, with satellite-based landscape-heterogeneity measure, and nightlight intensity data. We further explore in some detail the largest conurbation in Israel, named Gush Dan, which includes the metropolitan area of Tel-Aviv and is home to about 50% of Israel’s population
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