The US COVID-19 pandemic in the flood season

Xinyi Shen; Chenkai Cai; Qing Yang; Emmanouil N Anagnostou; Hui Li

doi:10.1016/j.scitotenv.2020.142634

The US COVID-19 pandemic in the flood season

Sci Total Environ. 2021 Feb 10;755(Pt 2):142634. doi: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2020.142634. Epub 2020 Oct 1.

Authors

Xinyi Shen¹, Chenkai Cai², Qing Yang³, Emmanouil N Anagnostou⁴, Hui Li⁵

Affiliations

¹ Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT 06269, United States of America. Electronic address: xinyi.shen@uconn.edu.
² Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT 06269, United States of America; College of Hydrology and Water Resources, Hohai University, Nanjing 210098, China.
³ Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT 06269, United States of America; College of Civil Engineering and Architecture, Guangxi University, Nanning, Guangxi 530004, China.
⁴ Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT 06269, United States of America.
⁵ Department of Finance, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT 06269, United States of America.

Abstract

Flooding displaces large populations each season, which potentially increases the exposure of the vulnerable societies. Having failed to curve down the number of people infected with COVID-19 in the first wave of the pandemic, many states in the United States (U.S.) are now at high risk of the concurrence of the two disasters. Assessing this compound risk before the country enters the flood season is of vital importance. Therefore, we provide a prompt tool to assess the compound risk of COVID-19 at the county level over the U.S. We find that (1) the number of flood insurance house claims can proxy the displaced population accurately with more spatiotemporal detail, and (2) the high-risk areas of both flooding and COVID-19 are concentrated along the southern and eastern coasts and some parts of the Mississippi River. Our findings may trigger the interest of further exploring the topics related to the concurrence of COVID-19 and flooding.

Keywords: COVID-19; Compound Natural Hazard; Displacement; Flood.

MeSH terms

COVID-19*
Floods*
Humans
Mississippi
Pandemics
SARS-CoV-2
Seasons
United States / epidemiology