Lived population density and the spread of COVID-19

05/03/2020

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by   Dave Babbitt, et al.

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We consider variations in the rate of spread of COVID-19, firstly comparing between European countries and secondly comparing between US states. We show that the population density has a small but significant effect on the rate of spread of the virus. However we show that measures of `lived population density', which capture density as perceived by a randomly chosen person, do a better job of explaining variations in the rate of spread, achieving R^2 = 0.45 in Europe. We show that adding further measures based on the timing of the outbreak into the regression can increase this to R^2 = 0.58.