Kim Kyusik, Ghorbanzadeh Mahyar, Horner Mark W, Ozguven Eren Erman
Department of Geography, Florida State University, 600 W College Avenue, Tallahassee, FL, 32306, USA.
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Florida A&M University-Florida State University College of Engineering, Florida State University, 2525 Pottsdamer Street, Tallahassee, FL, 32310, USA.
Transp Policy (Oxf). 2021 Sep;110:478-486. doi: 10.1016/j.tranpol.2021.07.004. Epub 2021 Jul 8.
Healthcare resource availability is potentially associated with COVID-19 mortality, and the potentially uneven geographical distribution of resources is a looming concern in the global pandemic. Given that access to healthcare resources is important to overall population health, assessing COVID-19 patients' access to healthcare resources is needed. This paper aims to examine the temporal variations in the spatial accessibility of the U.S. COVID-19 patients to medical facilities, identify areas that are likely to be overwhelmed by the COVID-19 pandemic, and explore associations of low access areas with their socioeconomic and demographic characteristics. We use a three-step floating catchment area method, spatial statistics, and logistic regression to achieve the goals. Findings of this research in the State of Florida revealed that North Florida, rural areas, and zip codes with more Latino or Hispanic populations are more likely to have lower access than other regions during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our approach can help policymakers identify potentially possible low access areas and establish appropriate policy intervention paying attention to those areas during a pandemic.
医疗资源的可及性可能与新冠病毒病（COVID-19）死亡率相关，而资源潜在的不均衡地理分布是全球疫情中一个迫在眉睫的问题。鉴于获得医疗资源对总体人群健康至关重要，有必要评估COVID-19患者获得医疗资源的情况。本文旨在研究美国COVID-19患者就医空间可及性的时间变化，识别可能被COVID-19疫情压垮的地区，并探讨就医可及性低的地区与其社会经济和人口特征之间的关联。我们采用三步浮动集水区法、空间统计和逻辑回归来实现这些目标。这项在佛罗里达州的研究结果显示，在COVID-19疫情期间，佛罗里达州北部、农村地区以及拉丁裔或西班牙裔人口较多的邮政编码地区比其他地区更有可能存在较低的就医可及性。我们的方法可以帮助政策制定者识别潜在的低就医可及地区，并在疫情期间针对这些地区制定适当的政策干预措施。
