Effect of COVID-19 response policies on walking behavior in US cities
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Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic is causing mass disruption to our daily lives. We integrate mobility data from mobile devices and area-level data to study the walking patterns of 1.62 million anonymous users in 10 metropolitan areas in the United States. The data covers the period from mid-February 2020 (pre-lockdown) to late June 2020 (easing of lockdown restrictions). We detect when users were walking, distance walked and time of the walk, and classify each walk as recreational or utilitarian. Our results reveal dramatic declines in walking, particularly utilitarian walking, while recreational walking has recovered and even surpassed pre-pandemic levels. Our findings also demonstrate important social patterns, widening existing inequalities in walking behavior. COVID-19 response measures have a larger impact on walking behavior for those from low-income areas and high use of public transportation. Provision of equal opportunities to support walking is key to opening up our society and economy.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2020.12.07.20245282: (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
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:Strengths and limitations: We investigated the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on walking behavior in 10 of the largest US metropolitan areas using high-resolution mobility data. This data encompasses more than 1.6 million people and a wide variation in socio-demographic, health, and built environment aspects. The US is an important …
SciScore for 10.1101/2020.12.07.20245282: (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
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:Strengths and limitations: We investigated the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on walking behavior in 10 of the largest US metropolitan areas using high-resolution mobility data. This data encompasses more than 1.6 million people and a wide variation in socio-demographic, health, and built environment aspects. The US is an important exemplar internationally due to having the highest number of COVID-19 cases globally, its variations across metropolitan areas in existing active travel infrastructure and pre-pandemic walking behavior, and stark inequalities in walking behavior and health outcomes that should be explicitly considered within the COVID-19 response. Walking is the most common physical activity, but our dataset may fail to capture time spent walking when users did not carry their phone, and systematic differences may exist in wear time based on individual factors such as gender and age. Further, if we had demographic data associated with individuals’ mobility data, we could directly examine walking behavior across demographics at the individual level. However, the anonymous location data does not contain demographic information.
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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