Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2022 Jan 10;12(1):370.
doi: 10.1038/s41598-021-03926-0.

Assessing the impact of human mobility to predict regional excess death in Ecuador

Leticia Cuéllar  1 , Irene Torres  2 , Ethan Romero-Severson  3 , Riya Mahesh  3 , Nathaniel Ortega  3 , Sarah Pungitore  3 , Ruian Ke  3 , Nicolas Hengartner  3
Affiliations

Assessing the impact of human mobility to predict regional excess death in Ecuador

Leticia Cuéllar et al. Sci Rep. .

Abstract

COVID-19 outbreaks have had high mortality in low- and middle-income countries such as Ecuador. Human mobility is an important factor influencing the spread of diseases possibly leading to a high burden of disease at the country level. Drastic control measures, such as complete lockdown, are effective epidemic controls, yet in practice one hopes that a partial shutdown would suffice. It is an open problem to determine how much mobility can be allowed while controlling an outbreak. In this paper, we use statistical models to relate human mobility to the excess death in Ecuador while controlling for demographic factors. The mobility index provided by GRANDATA, based on mobile phone users, represents the change of number of out-of-home events with respect to a benchmark date (March 2nd, 2020). The study confirms the global trend that more men are dying than expected compared to women, and that people under 30 show less deaths than expected, particularly individuals younger than 20 with a death rate reduction between 22 and 27%. The weekly median mobility time series shows a sharp decrease in human mobility immediately after a national lockdown was declared on March 17, 2020 and a progressive increase towards the pre-lockdown level within two months. Relating median mobility to excess deaths shows a lag in its effect: first, a decrease in mobility in the previous two to three weeks decreases excess death and, more novel, we found an increase of mobility variability four weeks prior increases the number of excess deaths.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no competing interests.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Map of Ecuador with provinces Figure created in R version 4.0.3 (https://www.r-project.org).
Figure 2
Figure 2
Time series of relative median mobility change for each province.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Time series of mobility change variability (IQR) for all Ecuadorian provinces.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Geographical and temporal evolution of weekly excess death factor for Ecuador. Figure created in R version 4.0.3 (https://www.r-project.org).
Figure 5
Figure 5
Heatmap of excess death factor by province with national restrictions.
Figure 6
Figure 6
Heatmap of mobility change by province with national restrictions.
Figure 7
Figure 7
Time series of excess death factor, confirmed COVID-10 deaths, and median mobility.
Figure 8
Figure 8
Cross-correlation between time series of excess death factors and mobility statistics.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

    1. Latin America and the Caribbean: Impact of COVID-19. Congressional Research Service. https://fas.org/sgp/crs/row/IF11581.pdf (2021).
    1. Cañizares, A.M. Ecuador confirma el primer caso de coronavirus en el país. CNN Españolhttps://cnnespanol.cnn.com/2020/02/29/alerta-ecuador-confirma-el-primer-... (2020).
    1. Heredia, V., González, J. Ecuador reporta su primera muerte por coronavirus; se trata de la mujer contagiada en el caso primario. El Universohttps://www.eluniverso.com/noticias/2020/03/13/nota/7780092/ecuador-repo... (2020).
    1. Faiola, A. & Herrero, A. Bodies lie in the streets of Guayaquil, Ecuador, emerging epicenter of the coronavirus in Latin America. Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/coronavirus-guayaquil-... (2020).
    1. Ecuadorian Ministry of Education. Comunicado oficial. Suspensión de las actividades académicas para los estudiantes para precautelar la salud de la comunidad educativa.[Official Communication. Classes are suspended for students to protect the health of the educational community]. 2020 (March 12). https://educacion.gob.ec/comunicado-oficial-suspension-de-las-actividade... (2020).

MeSH terms

LinkOut - more resources