Mobility trends provide a leading indicator of changes in SARS-CoV-2 transmission
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Abstract
Determining the impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions on transmission of the novel severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) is paramount for the design and deployment of effective public health policies. Incorporating Apple Maps mobility data into an epidemiological model of daily deaths and hospitalizations allowed us to estimate an explicit relationship between human mobility and transmission in the United States. We find that reduced mobility explains a large decrease in the effective reproductive number ( R E ) attained by April 1st and further identify state-to-state variation in the inferred transmission-mobility relationship. These findings indicate that simply relaxing stay-at-home orders can rapidly lead to outbreaks exceeding the scale of transmission that has occurred to date. Our findings provide quantitative guidance on the impact policies must achieve against transmission to safely relax social distancing measures.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2020.05.07.20094441: (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:Our analysis has limitations. Apple Maps data do have inherent biases. First, the demographics of Apple Maps users is unlikely to match the general population. Second, route requests are not a perfect indicator for movement or physical interaction and so are just a proxy. We also emphasize that the inferred relationship between population mobility and transmission reflects observations of the pandemic ramping up in the U.S. This …
SciScore for 10.1101/2020.05.07.20094441: (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:Our analysis has limitations. Apple Maps data do have inherent biases. First, the demographics of Apple Maps users is unlikely to match the general population. Second, route requests are not a perfect indicator for movement or physical interaction and so are just a proxy. We also emphasize that the inferred relationship between population mobility and transmission reflects observations of the pandemic ramping up in the U.S. This relationship can change over time, however, through behavioral changes not strictly related to population mobility. For example, if mask-wearing and social-distancing continue, the baseline β0 (and thus R0) may be smaller than the pre-intervention β0. Indeed, our simulations show that we must reduce baseline transmission rates with non-mobility behavioral changes to return to even a fraction of pre-pandemic mobility patterns. Our model is a simplified description of population behavior. We do not address realistic clustered patterns of interaction of the population. Further, we do not model the effect of weather or temperature, which may contribute to changes in transmission intensity across seasons (27). Recent reports suggest that the overall death count is severely under-reported (28), which may contribute to bias in inferences of epidemic dynamics if reporting completeness varies over time (29). Nonetheless, this work underscores the importance of new data sources for monitoring SARS-CoV-2 transmission. Privacy-preserving aggregated data from mobi...
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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