Mobility Functional Areas and COVID-19 Spread

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.

IACUS Stefano;  SANTAMARIA SERNA Carlos;  SERMI Francesco;  SPYRATOS Spyridon;  TARCHI Dario;  VESPE Michele; 

2025-01-08

SPRINGER

JRC121424

0049-4488 (online),   

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11116-021-10234-z,    https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC121424,   

10.1007/s11116-021-10234-z (online),