Spatiotemporal Associations between Local Safety Level Index and COVID-19 Infection Risks across Capital Regions in South Korea

Youngbin Lym, Hyobin Lym, Keekwang Kim and Ki-Jung Kim
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Youngbin Lym: Research Institute of Natural Sciences, Chungnam National University, Daejeon 34134, Korea
Hyobin Lym: Korea Rural Economic Institute, Naju-si 58321, Korea
Keekwang Kim: Department of Biochemistry, Chungnam National University, Daejeon 34134, Korea
Ki-Jung Kim: Department of Smart Car Engineering, Doowon Technical University, Anseong 10838, Korea

IJERPH, 2022, vol. 19, issue 2, 1-16

Abstract: This study aims to provide an improved understanding of the local-level spatiotemporal evolution of COVID-19 spread across capital regions of South Korea during the second and third waves of the pandemic (August 2020~June 2021). To explain transmission, we rely upon the local safety level indices along with latent influences from the spatial alignment of municipalities and their serial (temporal) correlation. Utilizing a flexible hierarchical Bayesian model as an analytic operational framework, we exploit the modified BYM (BYM2) model with the Penalized Complexity (PC) priors to account for latent effects (unobserved heterogeneity). The outcome reveals that a municipality with higher population density is likely to have an elevated infection risk, whereas one with good preparedness for infectious disease tends to have a reduction in risk. Furthermore, we identify that including spatial and temporal correlations into the modeling framework significantly improves the performance and explanatory power, justifying our adoption of latent effects. Based on these findings, we present the dynamic evolution of COVID-19 across the Seoul Capital Area (SCA), which helps us verify unique patterns of disease spread as well as regions of elevated risk for further policy intervention and for supporting informed decision making for responding to infectious diseases.

Keywords: Spatiotemporal Bayesian; COVID-19; infection risks; local safety level index; Seoul capital area; unobserved heterogeneity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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