The Geographic Spread of Covid 19 Correlates with Structure of Social Networks as Measured by Facebook
We use anonymized and aggregated data from Facebook to show that areas with stronger social ties to two early COVID 19 "hotspots" (Westchester County, NY, in the U.S. and Lodi province in Italy) generally have more confirmed COVID 19 cases as of March 30, 2020. These relationships hold after controlling for geographic distance to the hotspots as well as for the income and population density of the regions. These results suggest that data from online social networks may prove useful to epidemiologists and others hoping to forecast the spread of communicable diseases such as COVID 19.
ArXiv