The role of built and social environmental factors in Covid-19 transmission: A look at America’s capital city

Abstract

The goal of this research was to investigate the multifaceted interrelationships between the built and social environments and the impact of this relationship on population-level health in the context of the novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). More specifically, this study assessed the relationship between several social determinants of health, including housing quality, living condition, travel pattern, race/ethnicity, household income, and COVID-19 outcomes in Washington, D.C (DC). Using built environment and social environment data extracted from the DC energy benchmarking and American Community Survey databases, more than 130,000 housing units were analyzed against COVID-19 case counts, death counts, mortality rate, age adjusted incidence rate and fatality rate data for DC wards. The results demonstrated that housing quality, living condition, race and occupation were strongly correlated with COVID-19 death count. The potential hot spots within DC were also identified based the regression model using currently available data. It can be concluded that based on the current available COVID-19 information, the identified combined built and social environment variables are the strongest and most significant predicators of COVID-19 death counts. And among those variables, crowding ratio has most significant influence, followed by work commute time and Black American Ratio.