The effect of eviction moratoria on the transmission of SARS-CoV-2

  1. Anjalika Nande
  2. Justin Sheen
  3. Emma L. Walters
  4. Brennan Klein
  5. Matteo Chinazzi
  6. Andrei H. Gheorghe
  7. Ben Adlam
  8. Julianna Shinnick
  9. Maria Florencia Tejeda
  10. Samuel V. Scarpino
  11. Alessandro Vespignani
  12. Andrew J. Greenlee
  13. Daniel Schneider
  14. Michael Z. Levy
  15. Alison L. Hill

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Abstract

Massive unemployment during the COVID-19 pandemic could result in an eviction crisis in US cities. Here we model the effect of evictions on SARS-CoV-2 epidemics, simulating viral transmission within and among households in a theoretical metropolitan area. We recreate a range of urban epidemic trajectories and project the course of the epidemic under two counterfactual scenarios, one in which a strict moratorium on evictions is in place and enforced, and another in which evictions are allowed to resume at baseline or increased rates. We find, across scenarios, that evictions lead to significant increases in infections. Applying our model to Philadelphia using locally-specific parameters shows that the increase is especially profound in models that consider realistically heterogenous cities in which both evictions and contacts occur more frequently in poorer neighborhoods. Our results provide a basis to assess eviction moratoria and show that policies to stem evictions are a warranted and important component of COVID-19 control.

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  1. Version published to 10.1038/s41467-021-22521-5
  2. Rapid Reviews Infectious Diseases

    Srini Venkatramanan

    Review 2: "The effect of eviction moratoriums on the transmission of SARS-CoV-2"

    Reviewers find this a timely paper that makes a case for the epidemiological importance of maintaining eviction moratoriums, but may overstate its conclusions given the simplicity of the model.

  3. Rapid Reviews Infectious Diseases

    Review 1: "The effect of eviction moratoriums on the transmission of SARS-CoV-2"

    Reviewers find this a timely paper that makes a case for the epidemiological importance of maintaining eviction moratoriums, but may overstate its conclusions given the simplicity of the model.

  5. Version published to 10.1101/2020.10.27.20220897v2 on medRxiv
  6. ScreenIT

    SciScore for 10.1101/2020.10.27.20220897: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.

    Table 2: Resources

    Software and Algorithms
    SentencesResources
    Then, we chose all metropolitan areas with at least 1 million residents (53 cities) and used dynamical time warping and hierarchical clustering (using the hclust function with method ward.D and the dtw package in R) on case and death time courses (normalized by population) up to Aug 31 2020 to group cities with similar trajectories.
    hclust
    suggested: (HCLUST, RRID:SCR_009154)

    Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your code and data.

    Results from LimitationRecognizer: An explicit section about the limitations of the techniques employed in this study was not found. We encourage authors to address study limitations.

    Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.

    Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.

    Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.

    Results from rtransparent:
    • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • No protocol registration statement was detected.

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  7. Version published to 10.1101/2020.10.27.20220897v1 on medRxiv