Characterizing US Spatial Connectivity and Implications for Geographical Disease Dynamics and Metapopulation Modeling: Longitudinal Observational Study

Our work demonstrates that intercounty mobility was negligibly affected outside the lockdown period in April 2020, explaining the broad spatial distribution of COVID-19 outbreaks in the United States during the early phase of the pandemic. Such geographically dispersed outbreaks place a significant strain on national public health resources and necessitate complex metapopulation modeling approaches for predicting disease dynamics and control design. We thus inform the design of such metapopulation models to balance high disease predictability with low data requirements.