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Local travel behaviour under continuing COVID-19 waves- A proxy for pandemic fatigue?

ABSTRACT: COVID-19 continues to threaten the world. Relaxing local travel behaviours on preventing the spread of COVID-19, may increase the infection risk in subsequent waves of SARS-CoV-2 transmission. In this study, we analysed changes in the travel behaviour of different population groups (adult, child, student, elderly) during four pandemic waves in Hong Kong before January 2021, by 4-billion second-by-second smartcard records of subway. A significant continuous relaxation in human travel behaviour was observed during the four waves of SARS-CoV-2 transmission. Residents sharply reduced their local travel by 51.9%, 50.1%, 27.6%, and 20.5% from the first to fourth pandemic waves, respectively. The population flow in residential areas, workplaces, schools, shopping areas, amusement areas and border areas, decreased on average by 30.3%, 33.5%, 41.9%, 58.1%, 85.4% and 99.6%, respectively, during the pandemic weeks. We also found that many other cities around the world experienced a similar relaxation trend in local travel behaviour, by comparing traffic congestion data during the pandemic with data from the same period in 2019. The quantitative pandemic fatigue in local travel behaviour could help governments partially predicting personal protective behaviours, and thus to suggest more accurate interventions during subsequent waves, especially for highly infectious virus variants such as Omicron.

SUBMITTER: Zhang N

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9850857 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Local travel behaviour under continuing COVID-19 waves- A proxy for pandemic fatigue?

Zhang Nan N Hu Tingrui T Shang Shujia S Zhang Shiyao S Jia Wei W Chen Jinhang J Zhang Zixuan Z Su Boni B Wang Zhenyu Z Cheng Reynold R Li Yuguo Y

Transportation research interdisciplinary perspectives 20230119

COVID-19 continues to threaten the world. Relaxing local travel behaviours on preventing the spread of COVID-19, may increase the infection risk in subsequent waves of SARS-CoV-2 transmission. In this study, we analysed changes in the travel behaviour of different population groups (adult, child, student, elderly) during four pandemic waves in Hong Kong before January 2021, by 4-billion second-by-second smartcard records of subway. A significant continuous relaxation in human travel behaviour wa ...[more]

PMID: 36694823

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Project description:BackgroundThe COVID-19 pandemic had wide-ranging systemic impacts, with implications for social and behavioral factors in human health. The pandemic may introduce history bias in population-level research studies of other health topics during the COVID-19 period.ObjectiveWe sought to identify and validate an accessible, flexible measure to serve as a covariate in research spanning the COVID-19 pandemic period.MethodsTransportation Security Administration checkpoint travel numbers were used to calculate a weekly sum of daily passengers and validated against two measures with strong face validity: (1) a self-reported item on social distancing practices drawn from a continuous tracking survey among a national sample of youths and young adults (15-24 years) in the United States (N=45,080, approximately 280 unique respondents each week); and (2) Google's Community Mobility Reports, which calculate daily values at the national level to represent rates of change in visits and length of stays to public spaces. For the self-reported survey data, an aggregated week-level variable was calculated as the proportion of respondents who did not practice social distancing that week (January 1, 2019, to May 31, 2022). For the community mobility data, a weekly estimate of change was calculated using daily values compared to a 5-week prepandemic baseline period (January 3, 2020, to February 6, 2020). Spearman rank correlation coefficients were calculated for each comparison.ResultsCheckpoint travel data ranged from 668,719 travelers in the week of April 8, 2020, to nearly 15.5 million travelers in the week of May 18, 2022. The weekly proportion of survey respondents who did not practice social distancing ranged from 18.1% (n=42; week of April 15, 2020) to 70.9% (n=213; week of May 25, 2022). The measures were strongly correlated from January 2019 to May 2022 (ρ=0.90, P<.001) and March 2020 to May 2022 (ρ=0.87, P<.001). Strong correlations were observed when analyses were restricted to age groups (15-17 years: ρ=0.90; P<.001; 18-20 years: ρ=0.87; P<.001; 21-24 years: ρ=0.88; P<.001), racial or ethnic minorities (ρ=0.86, P<.001), and respondents with lower socioeconomic status (ρ=0.88, P<.001). There were also strong correlations between the weekly change from the baseline period for checkpoint travel data and community mobility data for transit stations (ρ=0.92, P<.001) and retail and recreation (ρ=0.89, P<.001), and moderate significant correlations for grocery and pharmacy (ρ=0.68, P<.001) and parks (ρ=0.62, P<.001). A strong negative correlation was observed for places of residence (ρ=-0.78, P<.001), and a weak but significant positive correlation was found for workplaces (ρ=0.24, P<.001).ConclusionsThe Transportation Security Administration's travel checkpoint data provide a publicly available flexible time-varying metric to control for history bias introduced by the pandemic in research studies spanning the COVID-19 period in the United States.

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Local travel behaviour under continuing COVID-19 waves- A proxy for pandemic fatigue?

Publications

Local travel behaviour under continuing COVID-19 waves- A proxy for pandemic fatigue?

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