An Urban Trajectory Data-Driven Approach for COVID-19 Simulation

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has changed the world deeply. Urban trajectory big data collected by wireless sensing devices provide great assistance for COVID-19 prevention. However, except for contact tracing, trajectory data are rarely employed in other preventative scenarios against the pandemic. In this article, we try to extend the application of trajectories auto-collected by wireless sensing devices and simulate the epidemic spread in a trajectory data-driven manner. After that, the effects of three nonpharmacological measures are quantified. In contrast to existing studies, additional requirements such as the complex topological networks are needless in our simulation, where the interactions between agents are derived by the intersections of their trajectories. Concretely, the dynamic of virus propagation among individuals is first modeled, and then an agent-based microsimulation environment is built as an artificial system to conduct the epidemic spread simulation. Finally, the trajectories are loaded into the agents as the reliance for their interactions, and the macroscopic changes under different interventions are revealed in a bottom–up way. As a case study, we conduct the simulation based on the trajectories in a real region, in which we find the following. 1) Among the three examined nonpharmacological interventions, community containment is more effective than keeping social distance, which can lower the deaths to nearly 1/9 compared to no action, while travel restrictions play limited roles. 2) There is a strong positive correlation between population densities and mortality. 3) The timing of community containment triggered by confirmed diagnoses is proportional to the number of deaths, thus early containment will significantly decrease mortality.