As the world experienced waves of COVID-19 over the past two years, it became clear that certain neighborhoods—those that are economically disadvantaged—were hit disproportionately hard by the virus.
Last week, a Mason researcher, Brian Levy, and his team published a study in the prestigious journal Science Advances that takes this analysis a step further, relating neighborhood mobility to the spread of COVID-19. Collaborating on the study with Levy were Karl Vachuska, a research assistant at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Robert Sampson and S.V. Subramanian, professors at Harvard University.
Levy, an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, said that the study takes into account a neighborhood’s mobility network. “For any neighborhood, it would be the other neighborhoods in the broader city or community that its residents visit or that they’re visited by,” he explained.
Levy and his team considered data for 2,000 census tracts in three distinct locations: Wisconsin, San Francisco County, and Seattle/King County, Washington. They used well-documented COVID-19 case data at the neighborhood level in these jurisdictions, and location data that came from millions of mobile phones. These factors allowed the team to understand the patterns of movement between and among neighborhoods, with the corresponding incidence of the COVID virus.
“What we’re doing with this project is trying to broaden our understanding of why neighborhoods matter,” Levy said. “We don’t just live in one neighborhood. We move about the city or the community in our everyday lives, and so our argument is that these connections between neighborhoods are another way that neighborhoods matter. It’s not just about who your fellow residents of your neighborhood are, but it’s about the neighborhoods that you or your fellow residents might encounter when they go out to work or play, and the people who are coming to your neighborhood, as well.”
Indeed, the study bore out these findings.
“We saw that more affluent neighborhoods tended to have lower incidence of Covid-19,” said Levy. “But even more predictive than a neighborhood’s affluence is its attachment to other affluent, or, by contrast, higher poverty neighborhoods. If a neighborhood tends to visit or be visited by affluent neighborhoods, that’s sort of an add-on protection beyond its own level of affluence.”
Levy’s research interests center on inequality in the United States with a focus on neighborhoods, segregation, poverty, and social policy. This study offers valuable insight into the spread of disease. “Our results suggest that inter-neighborhood mobility networks have important predictive power for the spread of COVID-19 and offer a useful new tool for public health officials to combat the current pandemic (and future ones),” said Levy.