Spatiotemporal Differences of COVID-19 Infection Among Healthcare Workers and Patients in China From January to March 2020

Peixiao Wang; Xinyan Zhu; Wei Guo; Hui Ren; Tao Hu

doi:10.1109/ACCESS.2021.3058155

Spatiotemporal Differences of COVID-19 Infection Among Healthcare Workers and Patients in China From January to March 2020

IEEE Access. 2021 Feb 9:9:28646-28657. doi: 10.1109/ACCESS.2021.3058155. eCollection 2021.

Authors

Peixiao Wang¹, Xinyan Zhu^{1

2

3}, Wei Guo¹, Hui Ren¹, Tao Hu⁴

Affiliations

¹ State Key Laboratory of Information Engineering in SurveyingMapping and Remote Sensing, Wuhan University Wuhan 430079 China.
² Collaborative Innovation Center of Geospatial Technology Wuhan 430079 China.
³ Key Laboratory of Aerospace Information Security and Trusted ComputingMinistry of Education, Wuhan University Wuhan 430079 China.
⁴ Center for Geographic AnalysisHarvard University Cambridge MA 02138 USA.

Abstract

Studying the spatiotemporal differences in coronavirus disease (COVID-19) between social groups such as healthcare workers (HCWs) and patients can aid in formulating epidemic containment policies. Most previous studies of the spatiotemporal characteristics of COVID-19 were conducted in a single group and did not explore the differences between groups. To fill this research gap, this study assessed the spatiotemporal characteristics and differences among patients and HCWs infection in Wuhan, Hubei (excluding Wuhan), and China (excluding Hubei). The temporal difference was greater in Wuhan than in the rest of Hubei, and was greater in Hubei (excluding Wuhan) than in the rest of China. The incidence was high in healthcare workers in the early stages of the epidemic. Therefore, it is important to strengthen the protective measures for healthcare workers in the early stage of the epidemic. The spatial difference was less in Wuhan than in the rest of Hubei, and less in Hubei (excluding Wuhan) than in the rest of China. The spatial distribution of healthcare worker infections can be used to infer the spatial distribution of the epidemic in the early stage and to formulate control measures accordingly.

Keywords: COVID-19; Healthcare worker infection; patient infection; spatiotemporal differences; spatiotemporal distribution.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. For more information, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

Grants and funding

This work was supported in part by the Key Program of National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 41830645, in part by the National Key Research and Development Program of China under Grant 2018YFB0505500 and Grant 2018YFB0505503, and in part by the Funding program: CAE Advisory Project No. 2020-ZD-16, National Science Foundation, under Grant 1841403,2027540.