To represent different regions of the U.S., we included four states—Connecticut, New York State, California and Texas—in the study. Generally, hotspots of LAN data are located in large cities or metro-centers for all four states tested, such as Hartford, CT, New York City, NY, Dallas, TX, and San Francisco, CA.
The maximum LAN intensity calculated by ArcMap tool is 254.68, 254.68, 235.14 and 190.30 in New York State, Connecticut, Texas and California, respectively. The mean LAN intensity is 92.31 in Connecticut and around 40 in other three states. The maximum COVID-19 case-rate is highest in Texas among all four states, which is around 67 cases/1k people, followed by California (around 47 cases/1k people), New York State (around 43 cases/1k people), and lowest in Connecticut around 27 cases/1k people at the time of data collection.
For Connecticut and New York State, the hotspots of LAN intensity, COVID-19 cases rate/1k during lockdown, and COVID-19 cases rate/1k during overall durations shared similar patterns that clustered around major cities in the state (Fig. 1), but were slightly different after reopening. Differently, in Texas and California, there were inconsistent patterns of hotspots for the four interested variables, but they share the similar trend that the hotspot-areas were similar for reopening and overall durations.
During the lockdown period, the hotspots of COVID-19 cases rate shared similar patterns with LAN data in Connecticut and New York states, but have different geo-patterns in California and Texas. During the reopening period, the locations of hotspots of COVID-19 cases rate were very different from the LAN data map in NY state, Texas and California. The hotspots patterns of COVID-19 cases rate during the overall period are similar to the LAN map in Connecticut and New York. On the contrary, the overall hotspots of COVID-19 cases rate were similar to the reopening period in California and Texas.
Analysis of multivariable regression models also revealed similar patterns to the ones that geo-patterns showed. The cross comparison among four states showed that there were statistically significant correlations between LAN intensity and cases/1k for overall, and lockdown durations in New York State, and Connecticut (P< 0.001). There was no statistically significant association between LAN intensity and cases/1k, for overall, lockdown, or reopening durations, in Texas and California (Table.1). The overall cases rates were significantly associated with LAN in New York State (p<0.001) and Connecticut (p<0.001), that every 1 unit increase of LAN will have a 15.6% increase in the overall cases rate in New York State, and a 3.7% increase in Connecticut. During the lockdown period, there were similar results for the overall period in NY state (p<0.001) and Connecticut (p<0.001). During the reopening period, there was a significant small positive association between cases rate and LAN in Connecticut (p<0.001). Based on R-squared results, the state-specific regression models could explain more variations in New York State (R2 = 0.80, 0.78 and 0.40) and Connecticut (R2=0.58, 0.57 and 0.21), compared with data in California (R2 = 0.22, 0.37, 0.23) and Texas (R2 = 0.13, 0.02, 0.12), for the overall, lockdown and reopening durations.