The Geographic Spread of COVID-19 Correlates with the Structure of Social Networks as Measured by Facebook / Theresa Kuchler, Dominic Russel, Johannes Stroebel.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Kuchler, Theresa.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Russel, Dominic.

Stroebel, Johannes.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w26990.

NBER working paper series no. w26990

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2020.

Summary:

We use aggregated data from Facebook to show that COVID-19 was more likely to spread between regions with stronger social network connections. Areas with more social ties to two early COVID-19 "hotspots" (Westchester County, NY, in the U.S. and Lodi province in Italy) generally had more confirmed COVID-19 cases as of the end of March. These relationships hold after controlling for geographic distance to the hotspots as well as for the income and population densities of the regions. As the pandemic progressed in the U.S., a county's social proximity to recent COVID- 19 cases predicts future outbreaks over and above physical proximity. These results suggest data from online social networks can be useful to epidemiologists and others hoping to forecast the spread of communicable diseases such as COVID-19.

Notes:

Print version record

April 2020.