Mobility Functional Areas and COVID-19 Spread

TL;DR

This paper introduces Mobility Functional Areas (MFAs), which are natural human mobility zones derived from mobile data, and demonstrates their effectiveness in understanding and managing COVID-19 spread in Austria.

Contribution

It presents a novel method to define MFAs based on mobility data and shows their relevance in analyzing COVID-19 transmission patterns.

Findings

MFAs have higher infection rates than administrative areas.

MFAs can inform targeted health policy responses.

The MFA dataset is publicly available for further research.

Abstract

This work introduces a new concept of functional areas called Mobility Functional Areas (MFAs), i.e., the geographic zones highly interconnected according to the analysis of mobile positioning data. The MFAs do not coincide necessarily with administrative borders as they are built observing natural human mobility and, therefore, they can be used to inform, in a bottom-up approach, local transportation, spatial planning, health and economic policies. After presenting the methodology behind the MFAs, this study focuses on the link between the COVID-19 pandemic and the MFAs in Austria. It emerges that the MFAs registered an average number of infections statistically larger than the areas in the rest of the country, suggesting the usefulness of the MFAs in the context of targeted re-escalation policy responses to this health crisis. The MFAs dataset is openly available to other scholars for further analyses.