ArticlePloS one2020
City size and the spreading of COVID-19 in Brazil.
Article in PloS one, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 45 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
45 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Effects of the built environment and human factors on the spread of COVID-19: A systematic literature review.The Science of the total environment · 2022Pooled it
- Comprehensive indicators and fine granularity refine density scaling laws in rural-urban systems.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- The urban infection susceptibility index and its application in cities of China.Biosafety and health · 2026Article
- Remarks on a Scaling Theory of Spread of COVID-19 with an Application to the Case of Bulgaria.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Spatio-temporal modelling of COVID-19 infection and associated risk factors in Dakar, Senegal.PLOS global public health · 2026Article
- Socioecology and Prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 Infection in Quilombolas Living in the Brazilian Amazon.American journal of human biology : the official journal of the Human Biology Council · 2025Article
- Scaling COVID-19 rates with population size in the United States.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2025Article
- Validation of modified COVID-19 Phobia Scale (MC19P-SE) to examine the relationships between corona anxiety and COVID-19 symptoms: A case-control study.Journal of mood and anxiety disorders · 2025Article
- Impact of inter-city interactions on disease scaling.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Article
- Complexity of the COVID-19 pandemic in Maringá.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- STG-Net: A COVID-19 prediction network based on multivariate spatio-temporal information.Biomedical signal processing and control · 2023Article
- Unveiling the paths of COVID-19 in a large city based on public transportation data.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Territorial differences in the spread of COVID-19 in European regions and US counties.PloS one · 2023Article
- Applying fuzzy qualitative comparative analysis to identify typical symptoms of COVID-19 infection in a primary care unit, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- COVID-19 and the city: Did urbanized countries suffer more fatalities?Cities (London, England) · 2022Article
- Influence of Population Size, the Human Development Index and the Gross Domestic Product on Mortality by COVID-19 in the Southeast Region of Brazil.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2022Article
- COVID-19 transmission in cities.European economic review · 2022Article
- Does poverty increase COVID-19 in Africa? A cross-country analysis.Health economics review · 2022Article
- Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The current outbreak of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is an unprecedented example of how fast an infectious disease can spread around the globe (especially in urban areas) and the enormous impact it causes on public health and socio-economic activities. Despite the recent surge of investigations about different aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic, we still know little about the effects of city size on the propagation of this disease in urban areas. Here we investigate how the number of cases and deaths by COVID-19 scale with the population of Brazilian cities. Our results indicate small towns are proportionally more affected by COVID-19 during the initial spread of the disease, such that the cumulative numbers of cases and deaths per capita initially decrease with population size. However, during the long-term course of the pandemic, this urban advantage vanishes and large cities start to exhibit higher incidence of cases and deaths, such that every 1% rise in population is associated with a 0.14% increase in the number of fatalities per capita after about four months since the first two daily deaths. We argue that these patterns may be related to the existence of proportionally more health infrastructure in the largest cities and a lower proportion of older adults in large urban areas. We also find the initial growth rate of cases and deaths to be higher in large cities; however, these growth rates tend to decrease in large cities and to increase in small ones over time.
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