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. 2022 Feb 11;19(4):2039.
doi: 10.3390/ijerph19042039.

Suburban Road Networks to Explore COVID-19 Vulnerability and Severity

Shahadat Uddin  1 , Arif Khan  1 , Haohui Lu  1 , Fangyu Zhou  1 , Shakir Karim  1
Affiliations

Suburban Road Networks to Explore COVID-19 Vulnerability and Severity

Shahadat Uddin et al. Int J Environ Res Public Health. .

Abstract

The Delta variant of COVID-19 has been found to be extremely difficult to contain worldwide. The complex dynamics of human mobility and the variable intensity of local outbreaks make measuring the factors of COVID-19 transmission a challenge. The inter-suburb road connection details provide a reliable proxy of the moving options for people between suburbs for a given region. By using such data from Greater Sydney, Australia, this study explored the impact of suburban road networks on two COVID-19-related outcomes measures. The first measure is COVID-19 vulnerability, which gives a low score to a more vulnerable suburb. A suburb is more vulnerable if it has the first COVID-19 case earlier and vice versa. The second measure is COVID-19 severity, which is proportionate to the number of COVID-19-positive cases for a suburb. To analyze the suburban road network, we considered four centrality measures (degree, closeness, betweenness and eigenvector) and core-periphery structure. We found that the degree centrality measure of the suburban road network was a strong and statistically significant predictor for both COVID-19 vulnerability and severity. Closeness centrality and eigenvector centrality were also statistically significant predictors for COVID-19 vulnerability and severity, respectively. The findings of this study could provide practical insights to stakeholders and policymakers to develop timely strategies and policies to prevent and contain any highly infectious pandemics, including the Delta variant of COVID-19.

Keywords: COVID-19 Delta variant; centrality; suburban road network; vulnerability and severity.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
A suburban road network construction: Left: Google map of Belfield (shaded by light red color) and its road connections with five other neighboring suburbs. The ‘=’ sign represents a road connection between two suburbs. Right: The corresponding road network. The edge weight between Belfield and Campsie is 4, since four roads connect these two suburbs. We repeated these two steps for each suburb considered in this study to have the final suburban road network, as presented in in the results section.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Suburb road network and COVID-19 case count Greater Sydney LGAs for the second wave of COVID-19, case count up to 10 October 2021. Postcode area’s shade indicates case count, network’s node color indicates degree centrality, and edge thickness is proportionate to the number of shared roads between the corresponding postal regions.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Correlation matrix among the variables considered in this study. Significance levels of 0.01 and 0.05 have been represented by two asterisks (**) and one asterisk (*), respectively.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Feature importance results from the random forest regression for (a) COVID-19 vulnerability and (b) COVID-19 severity.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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Supplementary concepts