Associations between high-risk business types for respiratory pathogen transmission and COVID cases in Wisconsin neighborhoods

Abstract

Introduction Business types play a key role in neighborhood respiratory pathogen spread, including COVID-19, yet few studies have investigated what business types are high-risk and why. This study presents a novel measure that characterizes business types according to their hypothesized risk for respiratory pathogen transmission and examines the relationship between the proportion of high-risk businesses in a neighborhood and neighborhood social factors. Methodology Using business density data from the National Neighborhood Data Archive (NANDA), we created a score to identify business types that may be high risk for respiratory pathogen transmission. Scores for each business type were derived from the average number of visits and time spent there sourced from Advan Research mobile phone data, and our conceptualization of the most prevalent interactions occurring there. Business types with a score of 8 or higher were labeled “high risk” and businesses with a score lower than 8 were labeled “low risk”. We calculated the proportion of businesses in each Wisconsin census tract that were classified as “high risk” and examined Pearson correlations with neighborhood disadvantage, affluence, and population density from NANDA, across Wisconsin census tracts. Results Scores for 67 business types ranged from 2 to 11 with a mean of 7.30 (Figure 1). The proportion of high-risk businesses (mean: 0.26; SD: 0.10) was statistically significantly correlated with neighborhood disadvantage (r = 0.32; p < 0.01), affluence (r = -0.16; p < 0.01), and population density (r = 0.17; p < 0.01), across Wisconsin census tracts. Conclusions Our novel tool can be used to identify neighborhoods that may be most vulnerable to respiratory pathogen outbreaks due to the businesses operating within them. Using this tool, we found that neighborhoods with higher proportions of high-risk businesses tend to have fewer social resources, suggesting an even greater potential for respiratory pathogen burden.