ArticleJournal of urban economics2022
JUE Insight: The geographic spread of COVID-19 correlates with the structure of social networks as measured by Facebook.
Article in Journal of urban economics, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 96 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
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Who cites it
96 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- A Review of Influencing Factors on Spatial Spread of COVID-19 Based on Geographical Perspective.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2021Pooled it
- Inferring Seasonal Modulation of Early SARS-CoV-2 Transmissibility from Cross-Country Environmental and Population-Level Predictors.Pathogens (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- The Social Connectedness Index: A large-scale dataset of social ties across geographic locations.Data in brief · 2026Article
- Remarks on a Scaling Theory of Spread of COVID-19 with an Application to the Case of Bulgaria.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- The impact of confounders, spillovers and interactions on social distancing policy effects estimates.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Socio-Spatial Patterns of Suicide Mortality in the United States.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2025Article
- Economic connectivity and clustering: The influence of social connections on maternal and infant health.SSM - population health · 2025Article
- Epidemic evolutionarily stable strategies within an age-structured host population.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Amplification of the power of network hubs and degree skewness over infectious disease spread during lulls.PloS one · 2025Article
- Measuring network dynamics of opioid overdose deaths in the United States.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Article
- COVID-19 and friendships: Agreeableness and neuroticism are associated with more concern about COVID-19 and friends' risky behaviors.Personality and individual differences · 2023Article
- Unique SARS-CoV-2 Variants, Tourism Metrics, and B.1.2 Emergence in Early COVID-19 Pandemic: A Correlation Analysis in South Dakota.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2023Article
- Social vulnerability and initial COVID-19 community spread in the US South: a machine learning approach.BMJ health & care informatics · 2023Article
- The role of the big geographic sort in online news circulation among U.S. Reddit users.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Optimal interventions in networks during a pandemic.Journal of population economics · 2023Article
- JUE Insight: Urban flight seeded the COVID-19 pandemic across the United States.Journal of urban economics · 2023Article
- Will the Relaxation of COVID-19 Control Measures Have an Impact on the Chinese Internet-Using Public? Social Media-Based Topic and Sentiment Analysis.International journal of public health · 2023Article
- Spatial networks and the spread of COVID-19: results and policy implications from Germany.Jahrbuch fur Regionalwissenschaftt = Review of regional research · 2023Article
- Consumer mobility and expenditure during the COVID-19 containments: Evidence from French transaction data.European economic review · 2023Article
36 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
We use aggregated data from Facebook to show that COVID-19 is more likely to spread between regions with stronger social network connections. Areas with more social ties to two early COVID-19 "hotspots" (Westchester County, NY, in the U.S. and Lodi province in Italy) generally had more confirmed COVID-19 cases by the end of March. These relationships hold after controlling for geographic distance to the hotspots as well as the population density and demographics of the regions. As the pandemic progressed in the U.S., a county's social proximity to recent COVID-19 cases and deaths predicts future outbreaks over and above physical proximity and demographics. In part due to its broad coverage, social connectedness data provides additional predictive power to measures based on smartphone location or online search data. These results suggest that data from online social networks can be useful to epidemiologists and others hoping to forecast the spread of communicable diseases such as COVID-19.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.