Differentiate between rural and urban areas in effects of COVID 19
Answers
Answer: Rural areas and urban areas are interdependent, not separate. Reflecting on discussions of COVID-19 on the future of rural and urban areas, it is evident that much of what has been written to date treats rural and urban as separate.
Answer:
The growing availability of statistical information on the spread and incidence of COVID-19 with territorial detail is making it possible to monitor the spatial distribution of the epidemic and link its incidence with various characteristics of the territories. In the case of Catalonia, the Catalan Agency for Health Quality and Assessment (AQuAS) has been providing, since the end of March, information on the daily number of positive cases of COVID-19 by Basic Health Areas (BHA) and by municipalities.
In previous short letters we have shown evidence of the association between the geographical distribution of COVID-19 and some factors of interest, such as population density, meteorological factors or the socio-economic conditions of the population in the different territories, among other factors. The aim of this research note is to analyse the differences in the spread of COVID-19 between urban and rural municipalities and its temporal evolution. In this analysis we define as a rural municipality the one with less than 2000 inhabitants. This criterion allows to divide the 947 municipalities in Catalonia in two groups consisting of 353 urban municipalities and 594 rural municipalities. This division is shown in Figure 1. In the first group, approximately 95% of the population live, although they represent only 35% of the 32,108 km2 of Catalan territory. Obviously, these figures translate into very different population densities between the two groups of municipalities, this being one of the factors that have been shown to be relevant in the transmission of COVID-19. This research is not intended to provide new evidence on the effects of density (an aspect picked up in a previous research note) but, understanding that this is a relevant dimension in the comparison between urban and rural areas, we intend to analyse whether there are other factors that may have contributed to the differences observed between both groups of municipalities. In this sense, the interactions, both in frequency and intensity, of the populations of rural areas may be different from those of urban areas, which probably affected both the arrival of the virus in different types of municipalities and the speed of their spread in them. Therefore, once pre-lockdown patterns of behaviour and mobility have been recovered, rural areas may still be at risk of COVID-19 even though no cases have been reported to date. This problem makes rural places statistically invisible, creating a false sense of rural immunity
Explanation:
the temporal evolution of positive cases has been similar in urban and rural municipalities with the difference that the disease came later in rural areas compared to urban ones. Figure 3 complements the above information by showing an estimate of the distribution of the number of days in which the first positive case of COVID19 occurred in rural and urban municipalities (counting from February 24, the day before the first recorded infection in Catalonia). As can be seen in Figure 3, the vast majority of urban municipalities recorded the first case during the first 30 days, while the distribution by rural municipalities is shifted to the right. Figure 4 shows the same information accumulated by days. Thus, it can be seen that while in the middle/end of March a positive case was detected in almost 100% of the 353 urban municipalities, this situation had only occurred in half of the rural municipalities. In fact, at the end of May this percentage has not yet exceeded 60% of rural municipalities. There are, therefore, 237 rural municipalities where no contagion has been confirmed at the time of writing this research note.