Mobility Functional Areas and COVID-19 Spread
This work addresses the problem of understanding and managing COVID-19 spread for policymakers and public health officials by using data-driven mobility zones, though it is incremental in applying existing mobility analysis to a new context.
The study introduced Mobility Functional Areas (MFAs) based on mobile positioning data to define geographic zones of high human mobility, and found that MFAs in Austria had a statistically higher average number of COVID-19 infections, indicating their utility for targeted policy responses.
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.