A vulnerability-based approach to human-mobility reduction for countering COVID-19 transmission in London while considering local air quality

Manu Sasidharan; Ajit Singh; Mehran Eskandari Torbaghan; Ajith Kumar Parlikad

Given that the immunity to the 2003 SARS-CoV-1 was reported to be relatively short-lived (around 2 years) [35] , achieving herd immunity for such diseases would be unlikely without 10 overwhelming the healthcare system [16] . Moving forward, human-mobility reduction measures provides the greatest benefit to COVID-19 mitigation [15, 14] as prevention is potentially costeffective than cure [22] or death. One of the most controversial debate in pandemic countermeasures is the potential benefit of human-mobility reduction and social-distancing attained by closure of public transport systems [21] . From a public policy perspective, there is a 15 need to achieve a trade-off between the potential public health benefits of closing public transport during a pandemic thereby delaying the community spread, against the socio-economic impacts of curtailing/reducing human mobility. Determining the vulnerability of regions/locations to COVID-19 might be helpful in achieving such trade-offs. To this end, this study demonstrates that the air pollution levels can serve as one of the indicators to assess a region's vulnerability to It has to be noted that the number of positive COVID-19 cases considered within this study are only those reported at the hospitals and does not include the growing number of people who are self-isolating due to COVID-19. While the individual risk of contracting and dying from COVID-19 is dependent on various factors (including age, underlying conditions, availability of health care, population density etc.), these results are informative for both scientists and decision-makers 25 in their efforts to reduce the transmission and impact of the ongoing COVID-19 outbreak through appropriate human-mobility reduction strategies.