Anran Zheng's Capstone Project
With the emerging variants, the COVID-19 is spreading all over the world, posing health and economic threats to numerous regions. The outbreak of COVID-19 has reflected some challenges that many cities are facing with, such as the unequal distribution of medical resources and the insufficient supply of COVID testing packages and vaccination. Currently few studies explored the spatial accessibility to COVID testing sites. Such research mainly focused on Florida state (Ghorbanzadeh et al., 2021). However, investigating a smaller, more precise level region will be more meaningful because in reality, people tend to travel within a sub-region to access the COVID-19 medical resources timely. In addition, many research analyzed the relationship between confirmed cases and its influencing factors (Cordes & Castro, 2020), and very few explored the driven factors of spatial accessibility to medical resources, especially from a geographic perspective.
Based on these challenges, this study will explore the spatial distribution of COVID testing sites, analyze the testing sites accessibilities and its influencing factors in NYC. It will answer the following questions: Based on the transit network, do New Yorkers have equal access to the COVID testing sites? If not, what’s the possible reasons and how to solve in the future? The findings can provide a framework for urban decision makers to plan the spatial distribution of medical infrastructures and allocate the medical resource rationally.
Please view the /rawdata/
| Data | Source |
|---|---|
| COVID testing sites | URISA's GISCorps |
| Subway/bus stations | OpenMobilityData |
| Road network | Open Street Map |
| COVID-19 positive rate (up to March 20, 2022) | NYChealth |
| NYC Demographic Data (census tract) e.g. median income, age, race … | US Census |
Data of each step can be found under /process/
- the spatial distribution of COVID-19 testing sites
With spatial autocorrelation and kernel density estimation methods, the spatial clustering pattern of COVID-19 testing sites will be identified at the very beginning. - the spatial accessibility of COVID-19 testing sites based on the transit network
I hope to explore the testing sites spatial accessibilities over different census tracts in NYC by four different transit modes, including walking, buses, subways or cars. By integrating and analyzing the road network, population weighted centroids and COVID-19 testing sites, the GIS-based network can build a O-D travel time matrix, which evaluate the travel time from people to testing sites. - the influencing factors of spatial accessibility to COVID-19 testing sites
Based on some internal factors (the COVID-19 confirmed cases, the density of testing sites, population and road network) and some external factors (median income, age, race, etc) in every ZCTA blocks in NYC, this study will apply Geodetector method to analyze the influencing factors of spatial accessibilities of testing sites.
The final outcome can be found under /results/
My final deliverable will be a research paper with GIS analysis about a substantive question.