Unequal impact and spatial aggregation distort COVID-19 growth rates
Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has posed unprecedented challenges to public health world-wide. To make decisions about mitigation strategies and to understand the disease dynamics, policy makers and epidemiologists must know how the disease is spreading in their communities. Here we analyse confirmed infections and deaths over multiple geographic scales to show that COVID-19’s impact is highly unequal: many regions have nearly zero infections, while others are hot spots. We attribute the effect to a Reed–Hughes-like mechanism in which the disease arrives to regions at different times and grows exponentially at different rates. Faster growing regions correspond to hot spots that dominate spatially aggregated statistics, thereby skewing growth rates at larger spatial scales. Finally, we use these analyses to show that, across multiple spatial scales, the growth rate of COVID-19 has slowed down with each surge. These results demonstrate a trade-off when estimating growth rates: while spatial aggregation lowers noise, it can increase bias. Public policy and epidemic modelling should be aware of, and aim to address, this distortion.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Pub Defense Publication
- Publication Date
- Nov 22, 2021
- Source ID
- 10.1098/rsta.2021.0122
Entities
People
- Keith Burghardt
- Kristina Lerman
- Siyi Guo
Organizations
- Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
- Information Sciences Institute
- University of Southern California