Strategizing COVID-19 lockdowns using mobility patterns

During the COVID-19 pandemic, governments have attempted to control infections within their territories by implementing border controls and lockdowns. While large-scale quarantine has been the most successful short-term policy, the enormous costs exerted by lockdowns over long periods are unsustainable. As such, developing more flexible policies that limit transmission without requiring large-scale quarantine is an urgent priority. Here, the dynamics of dismantled community mobility structures within US society during the COVID-19 outbreak are analysed by applying the Louvain method with modularity optimization to weekly datasets of mobile device locations. Our networks are built based on individuals' movements from February to May 2020. In a multi-scale community detection process using the locations of confirmed cases, natural break points from mobility patterns as well as high risk areas for contagion are identified at three scales. Deviations from administrative boundaries were observed in detected communities, indicating that policies informed by assumptions of disease containment within administrative boundaries do not account for high risk patterns of movement across and through these boundaries. We have designed a multi-level quarantine process that takes these deviations into account based on the heterogeneity in mobility patterns. For communities with high numbers of confirmed cases, contact tracing and associated quarantine policies informed by underlying dismantled community mobility structures is of increasing importance.

Abstract licence: CC BY

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