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A “busy” sign hangs at a closed hotel in Salzburg amid the novel coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic on November 2, 2020.
barbara gindl / Agence France-Presse / Getty Images
Most cases of COVID-19 in major U.S. cities come from visits to only a few types of places, a new study suggests.
Restaurants, gyms, hotels and places of worship are among the 10% of places that seem to account for 80% of infections, according to a study published Tuesday in the journal Nature.
“These are places that are smaller, more populated and people live there longer,” study co-author and Stanford University professor Jure Leskovec said at a press briefing. on research, CNN reported.
Reducing the capacity of institutions to 20%, instead of shutting them down completely, could reduce transmissions by 80%, the professor said.
“Our work makes it clear that it doesn’t have to be all or nothing,” Leskovec said.
The study, which included researchers from Northwestern University as well as Stanford, analyzed cell phone data from 98 million Americans in 10 major cities, including New York, Philadelphia, Washington, DC, Los Angeles, Chicago. and Houston.
Researchers have been tracking people’s movements to places such as restaurants, cafes, grocery stores, gyms and hotels, as well as doctors’ offices and places of worship, while examining the number of coronaviruses in their areas. .
“On average, in metropolitan areas, full-service restaurants, gyms, hotels, cafes, religious organizations and limited-service restaurants produced the largest expected increases in infections when reopened,” says study.
Leskovec added that based on the research model, “infections occur very unevenly
“There are about 10% of the points of interest which account for over 80% of all infections,” he said, according to CNN.
People in low-income areas suffer the most, according to the study.
This is at least in part because residents have fewer of these locations available to them, so the sites are becoming more crowded.
For example, “our model predicts that a visit to a grocery store is twice as dangerous for a low-income person than for a higher-income person,” Leskovec said.
“This is because the grocery stores visited by low-income people have an average of 60% more people per square foot and visitors stay there 17% longer.”
Still, the study did not track people to potentially populated places such as schools, prisons and nursing homes, CNN noted.
This story originally appeared on NYPost.com
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