The role of transport accessibility within the spread of the Coronavirus pandemic in Italy

Cartenì, Armando; Di Francesco, Luigi; Martino, Maria

The Covid-19 pandemic has been an unprecedented global crisis leading to a huge number of deaths, economic losses and disruption of daily activities. Accessibility restriction measures adopted by many countries were a fast and useful response to contain the spread of the virus. Within this topic, the aim of this paper was to support policies and decision makers in the definition of the most appropriate strategies for managing the Covid-19 crisis. Precisely the correlation between the Covid-19 positive cases and the transport accessibility of an area was investigated through a multiple linear regression model. Estimation results show that the transport accessibility was the variable that better explained the number of Covid-19 infections (about 40% in weight), meaning that greater is the accessibility of a territorial area, easier the virus reaches its population. Furthermore, other context variables were also significant, i.e. socio-economic, territorial and pollutant variables. Estimated findings underline how the accessibility, that often measures the wealth of a territory, becomes the worst enemy of a territorial area during a pandemic, resulting the main vehicle of contagion among the citizens. These results are original and would allow to define possible policies and/or best practices to better manage mobility restrictions. The quantitative estimations performed show that a possible and probably more sustainable policy for containing social interactions could be to apply lockdowns proportionally to the transport accessibility of the areas, in the sense that greater the accessibility is, greater the mobility restrictive policies must be adopted.