Sajjadi Sina, Toranj Simin Pourya, Shadmangohar Mehrzad, Taraktas Basak, Bayram Ulya, Ruiz-Blondet Maria V, Karimi Fariba
Complexity Science Hub, Vienna, Austria.
IT:U Interdisciplinary Transformation University Austria, Linz, Austria.
Sci Rep. 2025 Mar 17;15(1):9082. doi: 10.1038/s41598-025-91008-w.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the world witnessed a disproportionate infection rate among marginalized and low-income groups. Despite empirical evidence suggesting that structural inequalities in society contribute to health disparities, there has been little attempt to offer a computational and theoretical explanation to establish its plausibility and quantitative impact. Here, we focus on two aspects of structural inequalities: wealth inequality and social segregation. Our computational model demonstrates that (a) due to the inequality in self-quarantine ability, the infection gap widens between the low-income and high-income groups, and the overall infected cases increase, (b) social segregation between different socioeconomic status (SES) groups intensifies the disease spreading rates, and (c) the second wave of infection can emerge due to a false sense of safety among the medium and high SES groups. By performing two data-driven analyses, one on the empirical network and economic data of 404 metropolitan areas of the United States and one on the daily Covid-19 data of the City of Chicago, we verify that higher segregation leads to an increase in the overall infection cases and higher infection inequality across different ethnic/socioeconomic groups. These findings together demonstrate that reducing structural inequalities not only helps decrease health disparities but also reduces the spread of infectious diseases overall.
在新冠疫情期间，全世界都目睹了边缘化群体和低收入群体中不成比例的感染率。尽管有实证证据表明社会结构不平等导致了健康差距，但几乎没有人尝试提供一种计算和理论解释来证实其合理性和量化影响。在此，我们聚焦于结构不平等的两个方面：财富不平等和社会隔离。我们的计算模型表明：（a）由于自我隔离能力的不平等，低收入群体和高收入群体之间的感染差距扩大，且总体感染病例增加；（b）不同社会经济地位（SES）群体之间的社会隔离加剧了疾病传播速度；（c）由于中高SES群体中存在的安全感错觉，可能会出现第二轮感染。通过进行两项数据驱动分析，一项基于美国404个大都市地区的实证网络和经济数据，另一项基于芝加哥市的每日新冠数据，我们验证了更高程度的隔离会导致总体感染病例增加，以及不同种族/社会经济群体之间更高的感染不平等。这些发现共同表明，减少结构不平等不仅有助于减少健康差距，还能总体上减少传染病的传播。
