Friday, September 11 at 3:00pm, Virtual Room (Zoom Meeting ID: 754 716 1091)

"A Spatiotemporal Analysis of Progression of COVID‐19 From Urban to Rural Areas in the United States"
Dr. Dan Han, University of Louisville

Abstract:

There are growing signs that the COVID‐19 virus has started to spread to rural areas and can impact the rural health care system that is already stretched and lacks resources. To aid in the legislative decision process and proper channelizing of resources, we estimated and compared the county‐level change in prevalence rates of COVID‐19 by rural‐urban status over 3 weeks. We used crowdsourced data on COVID‐19 and linked them to county‐level demographics, smoking rates, and chronic diseases. We fitted a Bayesian hierarchical spatiotemporal model using the Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithm. We mapped the estimated prevalence rates using ArcGIS 10.8, and identified hotspots using local statistics. Additionally, we identified hotspots based on estimated prevalence rates.