Correlation between mobility in mass transport and mortality due to COVID-19: A comparison of Mexico City, New York, and Madrid from a data science perspective

In most big cities, public transports are enclosed and crowded spaces. Therefore, they are considered as one of the most important triggers of COVID-19 spread. Most of the existing research related to the mobility of people and COVID-19 spread is focused on investigating highly frequented paths by a...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:PloS one 2022-03, Vol.17 (3), p.e0264713-e0264713
Main Authors: Vega-Villalobos, Andrea, Almanza-Ortega, Nelva Nely, Torres-Poveda, Kirvis, Pérez-Ortega, Joaquín, Barahona, Igor
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adult
Biology and Life Sciences
Cities
Cities - epidemiology
Cities - statistics & numerical data
Comparative analysis
Coronaviruses
COVID-19
COVID-19 - epidemiology
COVID-19 - mortality
Data science
Data Science - methods
Earth Sciences
Electronic devices
Epidemiological Models
Epidemiology
Evaluation
Humans
Local government
Mass transport
Medicine and Health Sciences
Mexico
Mexico - epidemiology
Mobility
Mortality
New York City - epidemiology
Pandemics
Public health administration
Public policy
Public transportation
Social Sciences
Spain
Spain - epidemiology
Subways
Transportation - methods
Transportation - statistics & numerical data
Travel
United States
Websites
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Summary:In most big cities, public transports are enclosed and crowded spaces. Therefore, they are considered as one of the most important triggers of COVID-19 spread. Most of the existing research related to the mobility of people and COVID-19 spread is focused on investigating highly frequented paths by analyzing data collected from mobile devices, which mainly refer to geo-positioning records. In contrast, this paper tackles the problem by studying mass mobility. The relations between daily mobility on public transport (subway or metro) in three big cities and mortality due to COVID-19 are investigated. Data collected for these purposes come from official sources, such as the web pages of the cities' local governments. To provide a systematic framework, we applied the IBM Foundational Methodology for Data Science to the epidemiological domain of this paper. Our analysis consists of moving averages with a moving window equal to seven days so as to avoid bias due to weekly tendencies. Among the main findings of this work are: a) New York City and Madrid show similar distribution on studied variables, which resemble a Gauss bell, in contrast to Mexico City, and b) Non-pharmaceutical interventions don't bring immediate results, and reductions to the number of deaths due to COVID are observed after a certain number of days. This paper yields partial evidence for assessing the effectiveness of public policies in mitigating the COVID-19 pandemic.
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0264713