Economic Diversity and the Propagation of COVID-19: How Vulnerable is Your City?

The heterogeneity of social and economic systems in known to play an important role in the propagation of contagious pathogens such as the SARS-CoV-2 virus. This heterogeneity, usually attached directly to individuals can also be found systemically in age groups, income brackets, and other important population characteristics. In this article, we identify a set of heterogeneous factors, associated not with individuals but with geographic units that include metropolitan and larger conurbations, that correlate with worse outcomes with respect to the COVID-19 pandemic. A key predictive factor is a lack economic diversity reflected in narrower occupational and industrial compositions. Although the exact mechanism by which these factors induce worse outcomes regarding the control of COVID-19 is not clear, one candidate explanation emerges in the stubbornness of work mobility, where units with lower economic diversity have populations that continue to go to work more than higher diversity units. The effect we identify is, in practice, as strong as many typically accepted drivers of disease propagation such as population.