arXiv subjects

Carlos Santamaria

Publications and source records attributed to Carlos Santamaria.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2021

Mobility Functional Areas and COVID-19 Spread

This work introduces a new concept of functional areas called Mobility Functional Areas (MFAs), i.e., the geographic zones highly interconnected according to the analysis of mobile positioning data. The MFAs do not coincide necessarily with administrative borders as they are built observing natural human mobility and, therefore, they can be used to inform, in a bottom-up approach, local transportation, spatial planning, health and economic policies. After presenting the methodology behind the MFAs, this study focuses on the link between the COVID-19 pandemic and the MFAs in Austria. It emerges that the MFAs registered an average number of infections statistically larger than the areas in the rest of the country, suggesting the usefulness of the MFAs in the context of targeted re-escalation policy responses to this health crisis. The MFAs dataset is openly available to other scholars for further analyses.

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arXiv2021

On the Use of Data from Multiple Mobile Network Operators in Europe to fight COVID-19

The rapid spread of COVID-19 infections on a global level has highlighted the need for accurate, transparent and timely information regarding collective mobility patterns to inform de-escalation strategies as well as to provide forecasting capacity for re-escalation policies aiming at addressing further waves of the virus. Such information can be extracted using aggregate anonymised data from innovative sources such as mobile positioning data. This paper presents lessons learnt and results of a unique Business-to-Government (B2G) initiative between several Mobile Network Operators in Europe and the European Commission. Mobile positioning data have supported policy makers and practitioners with evidence and data-driven knowledge to understand and predict the spread of the disease, the effectiveness of the containment measures, their socio-economic impacts while feeding scenarios at EU scale and in a comparable way across countries. The challenges of this data sharing initiative are not limited to data quality, harmonisation, and comparability across countries, however important they are. Equally essential aspects that need to be addressed from the onset are related to data privacy, security, fundamental rights and commercial sensitivity.

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arXiv2020

Human mobility and COVID-19 initial dynamics

Mobility data at EU scale can help understand the dynamics of the pandemic and possibly limit the impact of future waves. Still, since a reliable and consistent method to measure the evolution of contagion at international level is missing, a systematic analysis of the relationship between human mobility and virus spread has never been conducted. A notable exceptions are France and Italy, for which data on excess deaths, an indirect indicator which is generally considered to be less affected by national and regional assumptions, are available at department and municipality level, respectively. Using this information together with anonymised and aggregated mobile data, this study shows that mobility alone can explain up to 92% of the initial spread in these two EU countries, while it has a slow decay effect after lockdown measures, meaning that mobility restrictions seem to have effectively contribute to save lives. It also emerges that internal mobility is more important than mobility across provinces and that the typical lagged positive effect of reduced human mobility on reducing excess deaths is around 14-20 days. An analogous analysis relative to Spain, for which an IgG SARS-Cov-2 antibody screening study at province level is used instead of excess deaths statistics, confirms the findings. The same approach adopted in this study can be easily extended to other European countries, as soon as reliable data on the spreading of the virus at a suitable level of granularity will be available. Looking at past data, relative to the initial phase of the outbreak in EU Member States, this study shows in which extent the spreading of the virus and human mobility are connected.

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