Building Effective Regions for COVID-19 Policy Administration from Networks of Human Movement and Social Ties
- Clio Andris will showcase her project findings as a Geospatial Fellow for advancing COVID-19 research and education
- Jean-Michel Guldmann will serve as a discussant for the webinar
Clio Andris Georgia Tech
Building Effective Regions for COVID-19 Policy Administration from Networks of Human Movement and Social Ties
Susceptibility to infectious diseases such as COVID-19 depends on geographic transmission factors and the likelihood that the virus that causes the disease spreads to nearby places through travel. Although many studies have captured the decrease in the spreading of COVID-19 due to a reduction in travel and vaccination rates, we still know less about the types of geographic regions whose boundaries act as partitions between regions with large case rates and/or large case counts. To do this, we apply community-detection algorithms to large networks of mobility and social media to construct geographic regions that reflect natural human movement and social relationships at the county-level for the continental United States. We then compute COVID-19 case rates across adjacent counties and measure how often the frequency with which large rates occur across boundaries of these functional regions and across state boundaries.
We find that large COVID-19 case rates persist along the boundaries of regions constructed from geolocated Facebook friends and Twitter connections, rendering these as poor partitions. Existing state boundaries and regions constructed from migration networks perform slightly better. Regions constructed from GPS-trace (“trip”) networks and particularly commuter networks have the smallest rates of COVID-19 case rates along the boundaries indicating that these regions may reflect natural partitions that prevent COVID-19 spillover. These regions may be more effective than states for making policy decisions on opening areas for activity, implementing mask-wearing policies, and allocating resources for COVID-19 interventions.
Clio Andris is an Assistant Professor in the School of City & Regional Planning and School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. She studies social networks and geographical systems and directs the Friendly Cities Lab. The co-authors of this work are Caglar Koylu, Assistant Professor, Department of Geographical and Sustainability Sciences, University of Iowa, and Mason A. Porter, Professor, Department of Mathematics, UCLA.
Jean-Michel Guldmann Knowlton School of Architecture
Jean-Michel Guldmann is Professor Emeritus and Academy Professor of City and Regional Planning at the Knowlton School of Architecture (KSA), where he has taught from 1977 to 2012 and served as KSA Interim Director from 2005 to 2007. He has a Master’s in Industrial and Systems Engineering from the Ecole des Mines, Nancy, France, and a PhD in Urban and Regional Planning from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel. He has taught courses on optimization, decision analysis, population/economic forecasting, and energy and regional modeling at OSU, Capital Normal University in Beijing, and Gazi University in Ankara. He has supervised to successful completion the dissertations of 31 PhD students, including 6 students since his retirement in 2012. He has also hosted and mentored six Visiting Scholars from China and Turkey. His current research focuses on the analysis and modeling of the urban heat island and its mitigation, the role of green infrastructure in urban sustainability, air pollution from transportation and other sources, urban energy consumption, and land-use change dynamics. His research methodologies include spatial econometrics, simulation, and optimization, with, as input, big geospatial data (LiDAR, remote sensing, Census, cadaster). He has published a book entitled Industrial Location and Air Quality Control: A Planning Approach (John Wiley), 99 peer-reviewed journal articles, and 2 book chapters. He has been a member of the OSU Emeritus Academy since 2014.
Building Effective Regions for COVID-19 Policy Administration from Networks of Human Movement and Social Ties
Description
Date: Mon, Aug 9, 2021
Time: 4:00 - 5:00 pm U.S. Central Time
Status: Event Ended
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