A power-law-based approach to mapping COVID-19 cases in the United States

• 作者: Bin Jiang Chris de Rijke
• 来源期刊: 地球空间信息科学学报（英文版）
• 年，卷（期）: 2021,（3）
• 页码范围: 333-339
• 页数: 7页
• 语种: 英文

摘要

This paper examines the spatial and temporal distribution of all COVID-19 cases from January to June 2020 against the underlying distribution of population in the United States. It is found that, as time passes, COVID-19 cases become a power law with cutoff, resembling the underlying spatial distribution of populations. The power law implies that many states and counties have a low number of cases, while only a few highly populated states and counties have a high number of cases. To further differentiate patterns between the underlying populations and COVID-19 cases, we derived their inherent hierarchy or spatial heterogeneity characterized by the ht-index. We found that the ht-index of COVID-19 cases persistently approaches that of the populations; that is, 5 and 7 at the state and county levels, respectively. Mapping the ht-index of COVID-19 cases against that of populations shows that the pandemic is largely shaped by the underlying population with the R-square value between infection and population up to 0.82.