Infectiousness of places: The impact of human settlement and activity space in the transmission of COVID-19
This article has been Reviewed by the following groups
Listed in
- Evaluated articles (ScreenIT)
Abstract
Places are fundamental factors in the spread of epidemics, as they are where people agglomerate and interact. This paper explores how different types of places—activity spaces at micro-level and human settlements at macro-level—impact the transmission of infections using evidences from COVID-19. We examine eleven types of activity spaces and find heterogeneous impacts across countries, yet we also find that non-essential activity spaces tend to have larger impacts than essential ones. Contrary to common beliefs, settlement size and density are not positively associated with reproduction numbers. Further, the impacts of closing activity spaces vary with settlement types and are consistently lower in larger settlements in all sample countries, suggesting more complex pattern of virus transmission in large settlements. This work takes first steps in systematically evaluating the epistemological risks of places at multiple scales, which contributes to knowledge in urban resilience, health and livability.
Teaser
Activity spaces and human settlement characteristics impact the spread of epidemics in multiple ways and should be considered in policy making.
Article activity feed
-
SciScore for 10.1101/2021.09.02.21263012: (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:There are a number of limitations associated with our methodology. In terms of the causal identification strategy, the DiD method requires both parallel trend and exogeneity of the treatment. While the parallel trend assumption is examined with an event-study design, the exogeneity assumption could be challenged by unobserved confounders that affect both Rt and activity space closures. Though we are able to rule out a number of …
SciScore for 10.1101/2021.09.02.21263012: (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:There are a number of limitations associated with our methodology. In terms of the causal identification strategy, the DiD method requires both parallel trend and exogeneity of the treatment. While the parallel trend assumption is examined with an event-study design, the exogeneity assumption could be challenged by unobserved confounders that affect both Rt and activity space closures. Though we are able to rule out a number of confounders by including a large set of interventions as well as unit and day fixed effects, there could still be endogeneity arising from omitted unit-specific time-varying factors. For instance, a sudden outburst of cases in a hotspot may affect both governments’ interventions and local residents’ cautionary behavior which then affects Rt. Second, since the impacts of closing different types of activity spaces are estimated in one model, the results could be subject to the so-called “table 2 fallacy” which refers to that the coefficients of confounders in a model are wrongly interpreted as full causal effects while they are actually only the direct effects (33). This problem applies if decisions to close activity spaces affect each other so that they become confounders. While this is possible, we suppose such relationship should be weak since the decision to close or reopen activity spaces tend to be more directly affected by the trends of infections, instead of the status of each other. Third, we assume linear relationship between Rt and the indepen...
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.
Results from scite Reference Check: We found no unreliable references.
-
