Transmission risks of airborne respiratory infectious disease and their influencing factors in and around urban outdoor recreational spaces

Abstract

Outdoor recreational spaces (ORSs) are essential for promoting urban residents' wellbeing and developing resilient and healthy communities. However, a nuanced understanding of the risks and risk factors associated with airborne respiratory infectious diseases in the environments surrounding various types of ORSs is lacking. This leaves an uncharted question regarding how to plan and manage ORSs and their surrounding communities to lower their infectious risks while maintaining urban residents' well-being during the disease outbreaks. Utilizing multisource data and employing the spatial error model (SEM) and geographic random forest (GRF) model, we propose a novel framework, taking COVID-19 pandemic as an example, to assess the infectious risks and identify risk factors in the environments surrounding ORSs in Hong Kong. Our findings show that communities surrounding parks, sports grounds, and plazas exhibited relatively low risks, while those surrounding playgrounds, children's playgrounds, and rest gardens experienced high risks. In addition, built environments contain more important risk factors influencing infectious risks than the social environments. Meanwhile, infectious risks may be influenced by multiple environmental factors that exhibited spatial variations. The findings provide pointers for spatial planning and the managing of OSRs in response to future respiratory infectious disease outbreaks.