School of Urban Design, Wuhan University, Wuhan, Hubei, China.
Research Institute of Economics and Management, Southwestern University of Finance and Economics, Qingyang District, Chengdu City, China.
PLoS One. 2022 May 10;17(5):e0267487. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0267487. eCollection 2022.
Since December 2019, the COVID-19 pandemic has quickly spread across the world. The traditional understanding of the relationship between wealth and the spread of contagious diseases is that similar to many precedent epidemics, the pandemic spread easily in poor neighborhoods in many countries. The environmental and socioeconomic implications of the COVID-19 pandemic are still poorly understood, thus this paper examines the relationship between neighborhood characteristics and the spread of the pandemic through a case study of Shenzhen, a Chinese megacity with many low-income rural migrants. The major finding is that wealthier and larger neighborhoods in Shenzhen were more likely to be infected in the first wave of the pandemic in 2020. This spread pattern is likely to result from China's strict control to prevent the pandemic, human mobility, and demographic characteristics such as income. This finding reveals a new phenomenon that contrasts with the traditional understanding of the influence of wealth on the spread of epidemics. This paper enriches the understanding of the role of neighborhoods in the spread of the pandemic, and it has important public policy implications.
自 2019 年 12 月以来，COVID-19 疫情在全球迅速蔓延。传统上，人们认为财富与传染病传播之间的关系是，与许多先例流行病一样，该流行病在许多国家的贫困社区很容易传播。对 COVID-19 疫情的环境和社会经济影响仍了解甚少，因此本文通过对中国特大城市深圳的案例研究，考察了社区特征与疫情传播之间的关系，深圳有许多低收入的农村移民。主要发现是，在 2020 年 COVID-19 疫情的第一波中，深圳较富裕和较大的社区更有可能被感染。这种传播模式可能是由于中国为防止疫情而采取的严格控制、人口流动以及收入等人口特征造成的。这一发现揭示了一个与传统上对财富对传染病传播影响的理解相反的新现象。本文丰富了对社区在疫情传播中作用的认识，具有重要的公共政策意义。
