Modelling Representative Population Mobility for COVID-19 Spatial Transmission in South Africa

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic starting in the first half of 2020 has changed the lives of everyone across the world. Reduced mobility was essential due to it being the largest impact possible against the spread of the little understood SARS-CoV-2 virus. To understand the spread, a comprehension of human mobility patterns is needed. The use of mobility data in modelling is thus essential to capture the intrinsic spread through the population. It is necessary to determine to what extent mobility data convey the same message of mobility within a region. This paper compares different mobility data sources by constructing spatial weight matrices and further compares the results through hierarchical clustering. This provides insight for the user into which data provides what type of information and in what situations a particular source is most useful.

Spatial Variations in Perceptions of COVID-19 in Relation to Socio-Economic Vulnerability in Gauteng, South Africa

“…During the period of the survey, South Africa experienced a 2nd wave of COVID-19 infections in December 2020, which resulted in the increased lockdown levels from an adjusted level 1 to an adjusted level 3 at the end of December 2020. Thereafter, the lockdown was lowered from an adjusted level 3 to an adjusted level 1 on 1 March 2021 [16,17]. In each of the 529 wards of Gauteng, a minimum of 20 interviews were conducted, while a minimum of 600 interviews were undertaken for each of the nine municipalities in the Gauteng City Region.…”

Gendered share of housework and the COVID‐19 pandemic: Examining self‐ratings and speculation of others in Germany, India, Nigeria, and South Africa

“…By March 2020, all four countries in this study had closed their borders to non-residents and imposed various degrees of lockdown restrictions (Kantis et al, 2021;Potgieter et al, 2021) to prevent the spread of COVID-19 infection and reduce the risk of the countries' healthcare sys-tems being overwhelmed. Between March and October 2020, when the data for this study were collected, all four countries had moved from full lockdowns (typically termed level 5: severe restrictions imposed on travel, and strict stay-at-home directives/curfews with exceptions for essential workers) to partial lockdowns (such as those termed level 3: public/outdoor spaces for recreation and take-away restaurants re-opened with specific social distancing restrictions).…”

“…Meanwhile, Germany has highly institutionalized social protection systems (e.g., unemployment insurance and nursing care; di Hollo, 2012 ; Mustapha & Uyot, 2012 ). Women in the three LMICs are typically overrepresented in the informal economy and have less access to health services or financial services unlike in Germany (Ohnsorge & Yu et al., 2021 ; Raveendran & Vanek et al., 2020 ; Vidisha, 2016 ).…”