Mapping home internet activity during COVID-19 lockdown to identify occupation related inequalities
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Abstract
During the COVID-19 pandemic, evidence has accumulated that movement restrictions enacted to combat virus spread produce disparate consequences along socioeconomic lines. We investigate the hypothesis that people engaged in financially secure employment are better able to adhere to mobility restrictions, due to occupational factors that link the capacity for flexible work arrangements to income security. We use high-resolution spatial data on household internet traffic as a surrogate for adaptation to home-based work, together with the geographical clustering of occupation types, to investigate the relationship between occupational factors and increased internet traffic during work hours under lockdown in two Australian cities. By testing our hypothesis based on the observed trends, and exploring demographic factors associated with divergences from our hypothesis, we are left with a picture of unequal impact dominated by two major influences: the types of occupations in which people are engaged, and the composition of households and families. During lockdown, increased internet traffic was correlated with income security and, when school activity was conducted remotely, to the proportion of families with children. Our findings suggest that response planning and provision of social and economic support for residents within lockdown areas should explicitly account for income security and household structure. Overall, the results we present contribute to the emerging picture of the impacts of COVID-19 on human behaviour, and will help policy makers to understand the balance between public health and social impact in making decisions about mitigation policies.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2021.02.04.21251171: (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: Thank you for sharing your code and data.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:Due to the nature of the data we analysed, our study has several limitations. With the exception of the CARE survey results, all of the data analysed in this work is aggregated to sub-populations. Therefore, a direct behavioural interpretation of the correlations we report is contingent on the assumption that the variables we investigate are independently distributed within these sub-populations. While there are likely to be …
SciScore for 10.1101/2021.02.04.21251171: (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: Thank you for sharing your code and data.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:Due to the nature of the data we analysed, our study has several limitations. With the exception of the CARE survey results, all of the data analysed in this work is aggregated to sub-populations. Therefore, a direct behavioural interpretation of the correlations we report is contingent on the assumption that the variables we investigate are independently distributed within these sub-populations. While there are likely to be exceptions, the spatial aggregation of areas by income security (Figure 1a and 1b), suggests that the spatial resolution of SA2 regions is sufficient to sample within the boundaries that define salient heterogeneity of the population for the purposes of our study. Another inherent limitation is introduced through the use of household internet data in quantifying behaviour across the income spectrum: home internet connections have financial requirements including usage fees and installation costs that may be prohibitive for those at the low end of the income spectrum. For example, a study in United States recently determined that household internet speeds typically increase with income, and the combination of both high income and high-speed internet is associated with an enhanced ability to self-isolate during the pandemic [21]. Using Australian data from the 2016 ABS Census, we computed a correlation of ρ = 0.50, 95% CI [0.44, 0.56], associating the fraction of households with an internet connection (as of 2016) with the income security measure computed h...
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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