(Press-News.org) CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- Attempts at restricting people's mobility to control the spread of COVID-19 may be effective only for a short period, researchers said. A new study examines people's mobility for seven months during the pandemic in the United States using publicly available, anonymized mobile phone data.
Reported in the Journal of Transport Geography, the study alerts authorities to the need for more manageable travel restrictions and policies that reduce COVID-19 exposure risk to essential workers - who, because they are required to be physically present at their workplaces, remained highly mobile during the pandemic.
The longitudinal study is one of the first to compare mobility data using a broad range of people over an extended period, rather than a cross section of data from a single point in time, the researchers said.
"The longitudinal approach allowed us to differentiate between two distinct waves over our study period: a first wave from March to June and a second wave from June to September," said Junghwan Kim, a graduate student in geography and geographic information science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who led the research with Mei-Po Kwan, a geography professor at The Chinese University of Hong Kong and Kim's doctoral adviser at the U. of I. "This approach also allowed us to look for relationships between mobility change and various social, spatial, policy and political factors."
The study used mobile device data from 2,639 of the 3,000 U.S. counties, excluding those with too little data, those with excessively high mobility levels and those with incomplete demographic data.
"We found that, overall, mobility declined sharply in March and April but quickly recovered to the pre-pandemic mobility levels from April through June, forming a V-shaped data curve," Kim said. "During the second wave that occurred between June and September, we saw very little change in mobility despite the COVID-19 pandemic becoming more severe."
A closer look at the data showed that mobility changes are associated with political partisanship, poverty, mobility restriction and high COVID-19 case numbers, the researchers said.
The team found that people's mobility in Democratic Party-leaning counties was slower to recover than in Republican Party-leaning counties; that counties with more poor people showed only a slight decrease in mobility throughout the study period; and that statewide COVID-19 mobility restrictions were more effective during March and April than from April to June.
"The political result not only corroborates the findings from similar studies but also reflects how the U.S. response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been highly politicized," Kim said. "The results that show that the working poor were traveling almost normally during the pandemic - likely because they tend to make up a large percentage of essential workers - is a problem that needs to be addressed."
There are limitations to this type of study, the researchers said, including the anonymous nature of mobile device data, which protects user privacy but hampers the ability to obtain more accurate individual-level data. Additionally, this type of data does not account for complex interactions between human mobility and COVID-19 severity.
"Considering that mobility is a critical component of people's daily lives in modern societies, such as the U.S., we hope that policymakers can carefully design and implement pandemic-control policies that people will find easier to follow," Kim said.
INFORMATION:
A Block Grant Fellowship from the University of Illinois and a grant from the Chinese University of Hong Kong supported this research.
Editor's notes:
To reach Junghwan Kim, email jk11@illinois.edu.
To reach Mei-Po Kwan, email mpk654@gmail.com or mkwan@illinois.edu.
The paper "The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on people's mobility: A longitudinal study of the U.S. from March to September of 2020," is available online and from the U. of I. News Bureau. DOI: 10.1016/j.jtrangeo.2021.103039
Being unable to walk quickly can be frustrating and problematic, but it is a common issue, especially as people age. Noting the pervasiveness of slower-than-desired walking, engineers at Stanford University have tested how well a prototype exoskeleton system they have developed - which attaches around the shin and into a running shoe - increased the self-selected walking speed of people in an experimental setting.
The exoskeleton is externally powered by motors and controlled by an algorithm. When the researchers optimized it for speed, participants walked, on average, 42 percent faster than when they were wearing normal shoes and no exoskeleton. The results of this study were ...
Young scientists of Tomsk Polytechnic University as a part of the team of Arctic researchers have studied pore waters in three areas of methane release on the surface. They first managed to define in details the composition of pore waters in the cold methane seeps of the Eastern Arctic seas. The research findings are published in the Water academic journal.
The research was based on the samples obtained during the Arctic expedition aboard the research vessel "Akademik Mstislav Keldysh" in 2019. The scientists and students from 12 scientific institutions, including Tomsk Polytechnic University, Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, Lomonosov Moscow State University, the Research Center of Biotechnology ...
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) largely remedies Superfund sites containing asbestos by capping them with soil to lock the buried toxin in place. But new research suggests that this may actually increase the likelihood of human exposure to the cancer-causing mineral.
"People have this idea that asbestos is all covered up and taken care of," said Jane Willenbring, who is an associate professor of geological sciences at Stanford University's School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences (Stanford Earth). "But this is still a lingering legacy pollutant ...
Sugar is not just something we eat. On the contrary. Sugar is one of the most naturally occurring molecules, and all cells in the body are covered by a thick layer of sugar that protects the cells from bacteria and virus attacks. In fact, close to 80 per cent of all viruses and bacteria bind to the sugars on the outside of our cells.
Sugar is such an important element that scientists refer to it as the third building block of life - after DNA and protein. And last autumn, a group of researchers found that the spike protein in corona virus needs a particular sugar to bind to our cells efficiently.
Now the same group of researchers have completed a new study that further digs into the cell receptors to which sugars and thus bacteria and virus ...
Researchers at Tokyo Medical and Dental University (TMDU) in a pioneering study identify clinical, genetic and histopathological characteristics that may help confirm the diagnosis when nephronophthisis occurs in adults
Tokyo, Japan - Nephronophthisis (NPH) is a kidney disease affecting mainly children. Now, for the first time, researchers at Tokyo Medical and Dental University (TMDU) have studied a number of adults with NPH and highlighted clinical, genetic and pathological characteristics that could help in confirming this challenging diagnosis.
NPH is inherited in an autosomal recessive pattern and, though rare, is the commonest genetic cause of kidney failure in children. The ...
It is 2,250 kilometers long, but only 355 kilometers wide at its widest point - on a world map, the Red Sea hardly resembles an ocean. But this is deceptive. A new, albeit still narrow, ocean basin is actually forming between Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. Exactly how young it is and whether it can really be compared with other young oceans in Earth's history has been a matter of dispute in the geosciences for decades. The problem is that the newly formed oceanic crust along the narrow, north-south aligned rift is widely buried under a thick blanket of salt and sediments. This complicates direct investigations.
In the international journal Nature Communications, scientists from GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel, ...
Tsukuba, Japan - Blood vessels can be injured by the build-up of atherosclerosis and long-standing hypertension, among other conditions. As a consequence, blood vessels may undergo a process called remodeling, whereby their walls thicken and cause blockages (known as occlusion). In a new study, researchers from the University of Tsukuba discovered how cells marked by platelet-derived growth factor receptor alpha (PDGFRa+) residing predominantly in the most outer layer of blood vessels contribute to their remodeling.
Blood vessels comprise three layers, each of which fulfills a unique role ...
Single-molecule fluorescence detection (SMFD) is able to probe, one molecule at a time, dynamical processes that are crucial for understanding functional mechanisms in biosystems. Fluorescence in the Near-infrared (NIR) offers improved Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) by reducing the scattering, absorption and autofluorescence from biological cellular or tissue samples, therefore, provides high imaging resolution with increased tissue penetration depth that are important for biomedical applications. However, most NIR-emitters suffer from low quantum yield, the weak NIR fluorescence signal makes the detection extremely difficult.
Plasmonic nanostructures are capable of converting localized electromagnetic energy into free radiation ...
Strawberry geranium (Saxifraga stolonifera) has been used in Japan as a herbal medicine to treat wounds and swelling, and continues to be an ingredient in food and cosmetics. Pharmacological studies have shown that extracts of strawberry geranium have antioxidant and antitumor activities. However, the anti-inflammatory effect of strawberry geranium on the skin had not been well characterized.
This study, first-authored by associate professor Takeshi Kawahara of the Institute of Agriculture, Shinshu University for a joint research project with Maruzen Pharmaceutical Co., ...
Dr. Sabrina Coninx from Ruhr-Universität Bochum and Dr. Peter Stilwell from McGill University, Canada, have investigated how philosophical approaches can be used to think in new ways about pain and its management. The researchers advocate not merely reducing chronic pain management to searching and treating underlying physical changes but instead adopting an approach that focuses on the person as a whole. Their work was published online in the journal "Synthese" on 15 April 2021.
It is not currently possible to treat chronic pain effectively in many cases. This has encouraged researchers from various disciplines to consider new approaches ...
