The urban infection susceptibility index and its application in cities of China

Le résumé fourni par la source

• This study constructs the two-dimensional urban infection susceptibility index integrating human activities and climate change, enabling global-scale identification of potential high-risk areas of epidemics under climate-urbanization synergies. • Under the influence of climate change, about 58% of known infectious diseases in humans are becoming increasingly threatening, with the total number of affected infectious diseases exceeding 200. The simultaneous occurrence of climate change and infectious diseases constitutes a serious compound health crisis, how to accurately identify potential high-risk areas of infectious diseases is urgently needed. • This study constructed a general urban infection susceptibility index (UISI) that firstly considers both human activities and climate change to predict potential high-risk areas of infectious diseases outbreaks. We apply UISI on the prediction of risk areas of corona virus disease 2019 in Lanzhou and Shanghai, which achieved good results. • This study provides innovative approach for identifying and analyzing the high susceptibility risk areas of urban infectious diseases. The urban infection susceptibility index effectively captures the main influencing factors of epidemic spread, demonstrating high accuracy and reliability, providing scientific basis for timely policy formulation and implementation of response measures to infectious disease outbreaks. Infectious diseases pose a serious threat to human health and social safety. In order to better respond to large-scale outbreaks of infectious diseases in the context of climate change, it is crucial to identify potential high-risk areas in cities. However, there is currently a lack of a standardized metric or indicator for quantifying the potential risk of urban infectious diseases. The main goal of this study is to construct an urban infection susceptibility index (UISI) to identify and quantify the risk of susceptibility, providing insights to constrain and prevent future epidemic. The UISI considers both human activities (population density, closeness index, betweenness index, life service, functional synthesis indicator, hospital accessibility) and climate change factors (temperature, particulate matter 2.5, wind, humidity), specifically designed to analyze potential high-risk areas of urban epidemics across cities worldwide. The UISI integrates a wide range of factors based on the criteria importance obtained through the intercriteria correlation method, producing a susceptibility risk map at urban fine-grid scale. We apply the UISI to the corona virus disease 2019 risk assessment in Lanzhou and Shanghai, which has been well verified. This index is both easy and effective to calculate across various cities, providing a scientific basis for rapid policy-making and implementation to prevent spread of infectious diseases. Furthermore, we predict the UISI trends across different Shared Socioeconomic Pathways, specifically SSP5-8.5 and SSP2-4.5, which demonstrate an increasing trend from 2025 to 2100.

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