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Measuring Spatial Accessibility in the Context of COVID-19 (2 of 2)

Dr. Daniel W. Goldberg and Jinwoo Park will showcase the findings or outcomes of their project thus far as a Geospatial Fellow for advancing COVID-19 research and education.

Dr. Daniel Block will showcase the findings or outcomes of their project thus far as a Geospatial Fellow for advancing COVID-19 research and education.

Daniel W. Goldberg
Texas A&M University

Jinwoo Park
Texas A&M University

Daniel Block
Chicago State University

Daniel W. Goldberg Texas A&M University

Measuring spatial accessibility to Intensive Care Unit (ICU) beds under the uncertainty of supply and mobility

As the spread of COVID-19 gets severe, many hospitals suffer the shortage of their Intensive Care Unit (ICU) beds capacity, and it deteriorates the sufficient access to health care facilities. However, the conventional approach of spatial accessibility measurement utilizes deterministic variables as its inputs (i.e., supply, demand, and mobility). It also assumes that full capacity of supply (e.g., all ICU beds are always available) and no interference of mobility (e.g., traffic congestion or unexpected delay), so that it may overestimate the accessibility to health care facilities. Given the accessibility and availability of ICU beds are closely related to the fatality rate of COVID-19, it is important to measure the reliability of spatial accessibility to ICU beds. To address the issue, our study incorporates the uncertainty of supply (i.e., availability of ICU beds) and time-variant mobility into spatial accessibility measurement. We populate the uncertainty in both data from their historical fluctuations and conduct a Monte-Carlo simulation to measure spatial accessibility from the stochastic perspective. As a result, the spatial accessibility to ICU beds substantially changes throughout the simulation due to the uncertainty in the inputs. Specifically, the robustness of accessibility is tied with the number of alternative supplies. Downtown, where numerous hospitals are located, demonstrates high accessibility with high reliability, whereas rural areas with scarce health care facilities have low and unreliable accessibility. In addition, our result reveals the disparity of the case-fatality ratio of COVID-19 could be attributed to whether locations have sufficient and reliable accessibility.

Daniel W. Goldberg is an Associate Professor of Geography and Computer Science & Engineering at Texas A&M University where he is also the Director of the TAMU Center for Geospatial Science, Applications & Technology (GeoSAT) and the TAMU GeoInnovation Service Center. Dr. Goldberg received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Southern California in 2010. His research encompasses a broad range of topics from spatial databases and geospatial health to geographic education to geocomputational approaches, most notably including geocoding techniques. He has served in geospatial leadership positions at the national level for UCGIS and USGIF and helps facilitate the largest GIS Day in the world, held annually at Texas A&M. In his free time, he likes digging in the dirt, being on or near the water, and snuggling his children while they are still young enough to allow it.

Jinwoo Park Texas A&M University

Jinwoo Park is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Geography at Texas A&M University, under the supervision of Dr. Dan Goldberg. He holds a B.S. in Geography and an M.S. in Geography from Kyung Hee University in Seoul, South Korea. His research focuses on the temporal dynamics in spatial accessibility facilitated by the recent data-rich environment. Particularly, his dissertation aims the following three agendas to enhance the accuracy of the accessibility measurements and furnish policy implications, which is the fundamental of GIScience and System. The first agenda addresses the uncertainties in the measures of spatio-temporal accessibility, and it investigates the reliability of access. The second agenda is to furnish better policy implications by temporally synthesize voluminous spatio-temporal accessibility measurements. The third agenda is to systematically organize the temporal changes of accessibility at each location and explore what may explain the spatial inequality of access. Besides his study, he contributes his geospatial knowledge to society by mapping fiber optic cables at the campus of Texas A&M University for his assistantship.

Daniel Block Chicago State University

Community Geography and Building Resilient Food Systems in the Context of COVID Response: A Case Study from Chicago

Community Geography is an emerging subfield that utilizes geographic technologies and methodologies in support of building resilient, sustainable, and equitable communities. It is flexible, in that it can incorporate methodologies from Public Participatory GIS projects to citizen science to surveys and participatory history projects. The Chicago Food Systems Action Council (CFPAC) is a non-profit that works to build a more equitable, sustainable, and resilient food system in the Chicago area. Over the past three years, a group of scholars and practitioners from the Chicago area and the Midwest have come together to support research that aligns with CFPAC’s goals. This group, the Midwest Consortium for Equity, Research, and Food Justice (MCERF) helped organize an evaluation of the Good Food Purchasing Program, which pushes public agencies to purchase food from local, sustainable, and ethically raised sources with good labor practices, and was part of the CFPAC’s immediate response to food systems issues in the Chicago area caused by COVID and the measures put in place to control it. Many of these responses involved using mapping tools. This presentation will outline community geography in general, discuss CFPAC and MCERF COVID response, and then focus in particular on an effort to create a useful and frequently updated online map of supermarkets in Chicago with a downloadable dataset, as well as an effort to map food manufacturers in the Chicago foodshed.

Daniel Block is a professor of geography at Chicago State University, a Predominately Black Institution (PBI) on Chicago’s South Side. He has a broad research agenda, much of which has been focused on community-university partnerships for food justice in Chicago. He is on the board of the Chicago Food Policy Council, as well as the steering committee of the Food Justice Scholar-Activist Activist-Scholar Network. He has completed many food access studies and is the author or co-author of several articles on the regulation of milk in the early twentieth century and the book Chicago: A Food Biography. He is a board member of the Chicago Food Policy Action Council, a fellow of the American Association of Geographers, and was the inaugural chair of the Geographies of Food and Agriculture Specialty Group.