Abstract
This study aims to provide an improved understanding of the local-level spatiotemporal evolution of COVID-19 spread across capital regions of South Korea during the second and third waves of the pandemic (August 2020~June 2021). To explain transmission, we rely upon the local safety level indices along with latent influences from the spatial alignment of municipalities and their serial (temporal) correlation. Utilizing a flexible hierarchical Bayesian model as an analytic operational framework, we exploit the modified BYM (BYM2) model with the Penalized Complexity (PC) priors to account for latent effects (unobserved heterogeneity). The outcome reveals that a municipality with higher population density is likely to have an elevated infection risk, whereas one with good preparedness for infectious disease tends to have a reduction in risk. Furthermore, we identify that including spatial and temporal correlations into the modeling framework significantly improves the performance and explanatory power, justifying our adoption of latent effects. Based on these findings, we present the dynamic evolution of COVID-19 across the Seoul Capital Area (SCA), which helps us verify unique patterns of disease spread as well as regions of elevated risk for further policy intervention and for supporting informed decision making for responding to infectious diseases.
Highlights
Published: 12 January 2022The severe acute respiratory syndrome-2 (SARS-CoV-2, known as COVID-19)was first reported in Wuhan, China in December 2019 and has continued to spread across the globe [1]
Our research focuses on clarifying the role of latent influences that originate from neighboring locations and temporal correlation
This study relied upon the monthly aggregates of COVID-19 confirmed cases of 77 municipalities from 1 August 2020 to 30 June 2021 (77 districts × 11 months = 845 observations)
Summary
Published: 12 January 2022The severe acute respiratory syndrome-2 (SARS-CoV-2, known as COVID-19)was first reported in Wuhan, China in December 2019 and has continued to spread across the globe [1]. In South Korea there have been a total of 364,700 confirmed cases (704 per 100,000 population) of COVID-19 reported, with 2849 deaths (5.50 per 100,000 population) as of 31 October 2021 [4]. The pandemic has hit the entire nation severely with a series of unexpected surges of events characterized by four heterogeneous waves. South Korea is currently going through its fourth wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, in which the number of daily confirmed cases has appeared to be more than 1000 for 100 consecutive days since early July 2021 [6]. The first wave broke out in the southeastern city of Daegu and continued until early May. At that time, the number of daily new coronavirus cases reached 813 on 29 February 2020. Cases were mostly associated with large gatherings at religious facilities and various multi-use facilities during this period.
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