Show the Community: Correlation Between New York City Hot Spotting Policy and Mobility to Reduce COVID-19 Spread

Another great publication by one of our Community members @Gordon_Ngai! :tada: Big congratulations to the entire team! :clap:

They used SafeGraph data to assess the impact New York State’s “hot spotting” COVID-19 strategy had on mobility among NYC residents in late 2020. The hot spotting strategy assigns statuses to modified zip code areas based on the areas’ COVID-19 cases and hospital capacity. Their chosen metrics, Average Median Percentage Time Home and Device-Weighted Average Median Percentage Time Home, had a significant relationship with the hot spotting status of a given area. Their work digs into one of the most location-specific non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) implemented in response to COVID-19. While many NPIs were implemented at the state, county, or city level, this work provides insight into the value of a more fine-grained approach.

You can read the full publication here :fire:

Drop any questions you have for Gordon below! :speech_balloon:


This topic was automatically generated from Slack. You can find the original thread here.

  1. I assume that there is a very strict word count limit – I am from a field where people complain about a 5000 word article limit as being too short for a short paper – but I didn’t know what the NYC “hot spot” policy was. I think the policy reference is this, where schools in affected neighborhoods were closed, but I could be wrong – a sentence of clarification/definition would be very helpful.
  2. It felt almost like you checked for statistical significance twice – once by measuring if there was a statistically significant difference in mobility on a given day, and then what % of days had such differences. Is this standard in medicine? (It might well be, I don’t read many medical papers!)
  3. I was not sure how to interpret the sentence “Brooklyn had 42 statistically significant days for AMPTH and 49 for DWAMPTH, while Queens had 12 statistically significant days for AMPTH and 7 for DWAMPTH”. How many hot-spot days did Brooklyn and Queens have? What percentage is this? Is this higher or lower than elsewhere than in NYC? Why these two boroughs?