ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2020
Spatial heterogeneity can lead to substantial local variations in COVID-19 timing and severity.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 62 papers.
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Who cites it
62 citing papers in PubMed.
- Hospital Capacity Pooling in Pandemics: Simulation-Based Mortality Impacts and Diversification Mechanisms.Risk analysis : an official publication of the Society for Risk Analysis · 2026Article
- Influence of spatial connectivity on the spread of Mpox in Maï-Ndombe province, Democratic Republic of the Congo, 2025.International journal of health geographics · 2026Article
- Mapping spatial colleague connectivity patterns from individual-level registry data to inform regional pandemic interventions.PLoS computational biology · 2026Article
- Partisan differences in health behaviors can impact respiratory disease dynamics.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2026Article
- Coupled Dynamics of Information-Epidemic Spreading with Resource Allocation and Transmission on Multi-Layer Networks.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Endogenous competition and the underrealized reproduction of infectious diseases.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Unveiling the social fabric through a temporal, nation-scale social network and its characteristics.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Fine-grained forecasting of COVID-19 trends at the county level in the United States.NPJ digital medicine · 2025Article
- SARS-CoV-2 Infection and the Risk of New Chronic Conditions: Insights from a Longitudinal Population-Based Study.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2025Article
- Bias in mobility datasets drives divergence in modeled outbreak dynamics.Communications medicine · 2025Article
- Spatio-temporal forecasting of COVID-19 cases in the Netherlands for source and contact tracing.International journal of population data science · 2025Article
- Comparing SARS-CoV-2 infections in the US Military Health System and national data: opportunities for future pandemic surveillance.Frontiers in public health · 2025Observational
- Unveiling pandemic patterns: a detailed analysis of transmission and severity parameters across four COVID-19 waves in Bogotá, Colombia.BMC global and public health · 2024Article
- On the friendship paradox and inversity: A network property with applications to privacy-sensitive network interventions.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- The learning curve of COVID-19 and organ donation: Potential missed opportunities in the COVID era.Heliyon · 2024Article
- Modeling spatial evolution of multi-drug resistance under drug environmental gradients.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- Analysis of the impact of COVID-19 variants and vaccination on the time-varying reproduction number: statistical methods.Frontiers in public health · 2024Article
- Environmental and geographical factors influencing the spread of SARS-CoV-2 over 2 years: a fine-scale spatiotemporal analysis.Frontiers in public health · 2024Article
- Revealing associations between spatial time series trends of COVID-19 incidence and human mobility: an analysis of bidirectionality and spatiotemporal heterogeneity.International journal of health geographics · 2023Article
- Modeling spatial evolution of multi-drug resistance under drug environmental gradients.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2023Article
2 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
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Abstract
Standard epidemiological models for COVID-19 employ variants of compartment (SIR or susceptible-infectious-recovered) models at local scales, implicitly assuming spatially uniform local mixing. Here, we examine the effect of employing more geographically detailed diffusion models based on known spatial features of interpersonal networks, most particularly the presence of a long-tailed but monotone decline in the probability of interaction with distance, on disease diffusion. Based on simulations of unrestricted COVID-19 diffusion in 19 US cities, we conclude that heterogeneity in population distribution can have large impacts on local pandemic timing and severity, even when aggregate behavior at larger scales mirrors a classic SIR-like pattern. Impacts observed include severe local outbreaks with long lag time relative to the aggregate infection curve, and the presence of numerous areas whose disease trajectories correlate poorly with those of neighboring areas. A simple catchment model for hospital demand illustrates potential implications for health care utilization, with substantial disparities in the timing and extremity of impacts even without distancing interventions. Likewise, analysis of social exposure to others who are morbid or deceased shows considerable variation in how the epidemic can appear to individuals on the ground, potentially affecting risk assessment and compliance with mitigation measures. These results demonstrate the potential for spatial network structure to generate highly nonuniform diffusion behavior even at the scale of cities, and suggest the importance of incorporating such structure when designing models to inform health care planning, predict community outcomes, or identify potential disparities.
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