Journal article
Evolving urban allometric scaling law of the COVID-19 epidemic in the United Kingdom
Journal of urban management, v 13(2), pp 308-315
01 Jun 2024
Featured in Collection : UN Sustainable Development Goals @ Drexel
Abstract
Infectious diseases depend on intensified social intercourse within large cities, resulting in a super-linear allometric scaling law with city size. But how this scaling relationship changes throughout an evolving pandemic is seldom studied and remains unclear. Here, we investigate allometric scaling laws between cases/deaths and city size and their temporal evolution using daily COVID-19 cases/deaths of cities in the United Kingdom from March 2020 to May 2022. Results indicate that cases exhibit a super-linear scaling pattern with city size, revealing higher morbidity in large cities. Temporally, scaling exponents stabilized at around 1.25 after a rapid increase from less than one and then decreased to one. Scaling exponents of COVID-19 deaths exhibited a comparable trend to cases but with a lag in time and a weaker super-linear relationship. Scaling exponents increased first, then stabilized, and then decreased during each wave. Temporal variations of scaling exponents reveal the spatial diffusion of infectious diseases from large to small cities, whose mechanism needs further exploration.
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Details
- Title
- Evolving urban allometric scaling law of the COVID-19 epidemic in the United Kingdom
- Creators
- Gang Xu - University of Hong KongSiyuan Zhang - Wuhan UniversityEdwin McCulley - Drexel UniversityRan Wu - Hubei Provincial Center for Disease Control and PreventionXinhu Li - Hangzhou City UniversityLimin Jiao - Wuhan University
- Publication Details
- Journal of urban management, v 13(2), pp 308-315
- Publisher
- Elsevier B.V
- Number of pages
- 8
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Language
- English
- Academic Unit
- Urban Health Collaborative
- Web of Science ID
- WOS:001298372000001
- Scopus ID
- 2-s2.0-85187334154
- Other Identifier
- 991022035171804721
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- Collaboration types
- Domestic collaboration
- International collaboration
- Web of Science research areas
- Urban Studies