Spread of COVID-19 in urban neighbourhoods and slums of the developing world.

ABSTRACT: We study the spread of COVID-19 across neighbourhoods of cities in the developing world and find that small numbers of neighbourhoods account for a majority of cases (k-index approx. 0.7). We also find that the countrywide distribution of cases across states/provinces in these nations also displays similar inequality, indicating self-similarity across scales. Neighbourhoods with slums are found to contain the highest density of cases across all cities under consideration, revealing that slums constitute the most at-risk urban locations in this epidemic. We present a stochastic network model to study the spread of a respiratory epidemic through physically proximate and accidental daily human contacts in a city, and simulate outcomes for a city with two kinds of neighbourhoods-slum an

SUBMITTER: Sahasranaman A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7879756 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature