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. 2021 Jul:70:102892.
doi: 10.1016/j.scs.2021.102892. Epub 2021 Mar 30.

What determines city's resilience against epidemic outbreak: evidence from China's COVID-19 experience

Jie Chen  1 , Xiaoxin Guo  2 , Haozhi Pan  1 , Shihu Zhong  3
Affiliations

What determines city's resilience against epidemic outbreak: evidence from China's COVID-19 experience

Jie Chen et al. Sustain Cities Soc. 2021 Jul.

Abstract

By employing the city-level data from China during the spring of 2020, this study investigates the relationship between city-level resilience against the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemics and its affecting factors, including the inflow risk pressure of COVID-19 virus (population inflow from the epicenter), city agglomeration characteristics (urban population density and city size), healthcare resource adequacy, among others. The results reveal that, while managing COVID-19 inflow risk pressure plays a critical role in the city's pandemic disaster resilience, city agglomeration characteristics also matters. To be exact, we find that large and high-density cities with high inter and intra-city mobility flows have more difficulties in containing the epidemic spread, but improving healthcare infrastructure adequacy and urban governance capacity can increase time efficacy of pandemic control and then improve the city's resilience against pandemic. Although our analysis is based on the performance of Chinese cities in the case of COVID-19, the research framework can be applied in understanding COVID-19 control performance of cities in other countries and the findings can be useful for improving health-related urban resilience and sustainability.

Keywords: COVID-19; Population density; Public health; Urban governance; Urban resilience.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
The time to contain epidemic spread and distance to Wuhan.
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Total COVID-19 confirmed cases of Chinese cities and city-level variations of the time to contain the epidemic spread.
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
Correlations between COVID-19 inflow risk pressure, health infrastructure and the time to contain the epidemics spread.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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