Mobility and the spatial spread of sars-cov-2 in BelgiumShow others and affiliations
2023 (English)In: Mathematical Biosciences, ISSN 0025-5564, E-ISSN 1879-3134, Vol. 360, article id 108957Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]
We analyse and mutually compare time series of covid-19-related data and mobility data across Belgium's 43 arrondissements (NUTS 3). In this way, we reach three conclusions. First, we could detect a decrease in mobility during high-incidence stages of the pandemic. This is expressed as a sizeable change in the average amount of time spent outside one's home arrondissement, investigated over five distinct periods, and in more detail using an inter-arrondissement "connectivity index"(CI). Second, we analyse spatio-temporal covid-19-related hospitalisation time series, after smoothing them using a generalise additive mixed model (GAMM). We confirm that some arrondissements are ahead of others and morphologically dissimilar to others, in terms of epidemiological progression. The tools used to quantify this are time-lagged cross-correlation (TLCC) and dynamic time warping (DTW), respectively. Third, we demonstrate that an arrondissement's CI with one of the three identified first-outbreak arrondissements is correlated to a substantial local excess mortality some five to six weeks after the first outbreak. More generally, we couple results leading to the first and second conclusion, in order to demonstrate an overall correlation between CI values on the one hand, and TLCC and DTW values on the other. We conclude that there is a strong correlation between physical movement of people and viral spread in the early stage of the sars-cov-2 epidemic in Belgium, though its strength weakens as the virus spreads.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Elsevier BV , 2023. Vol. 360, article id 108957
Keywords [en]
covid-19, Epidemiology, Mobility, Time series analysis, Generalised additive mixed model
National Category
Infectious Medicine Other Mathematics
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-330504DOI: 10.1016/j.mbs.2022.108957ISI: 001002818100001PubMedID: 36804448Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-85159231651OAI: oai:DiVA.org:kth-330504DiVA, id: diva2:1777946
Note
QC 20230630
2023-06-302023-06-302023-06-30Bibliographically approved