Lived population density and the spread of COVID-19
We consider variations in the rate of spread of COVID-19, firstly comparing between European countries and secondly comparing between US states. We show that the population density has a small but significant effect on the rate of spread of the virus. However we show that measures of `lived population density', which capture density as perceived by a randomly chosen person, do a better job of explaining variations in the rate of spread, achieving R^2 = 0.45 in Europe. We show that adding further measures based on the timing of the outbreak into the regression can increase this to R^2 = 0.58.
READ FULL TEXT